Samsung confirms it hasn’t killed the Note

The Note 7 may have caused some headaches, but Samsung has confirmed the range is still alive. Marie Brewis reports

The Note 7 (pictured) was a spectacular failure, hitting the company’s bottom line hard with a loss to the tune of several billion pounds, and a much harder impact on its reputation – one that may prove difficult to eradicate. Samsung is now faced with the choice of releasing the Note 8 much earlier to fill the gap in its product line and remove the focus from the Note 7, or to carry on as normal.

Reports suggest that the new phone will be released in February alongside the Galaxy S8, though this appears to have come from the idea that Samsung is expected to announce two phones and both are thought to have curved-edge screens. Though one will still have a larger screen and a highercapacity battery (and is expected to come with a dual-lens camera and higher-resolution 4K screen), Samsung isn’t going to be able to distinguish the two by referring to them as the standard and edge models any longer.

Plus, the Galaxy S-series edge is edging ever closer to the Note family in specification, with little more than an S Pen and some stylus-friendly software to distinguish the two lines.

There were whispers to suggest Samsung would be dropping its Note family, but dropping its second annual flagship launch could have an enormous impact on Samsung’s profit margins. Fortunately, the company has now confirmed that the Note 8 will exist.

What we expect from the Note 8

The Note family is best known for its large, highresolution screen and S Pen stylus support. We would expect the Note 8 to come with a 5.7in Quad-HD or 4K SuperAMOLED display. It’s likely to be under 8mm thick (unless Samsung decides this is what caused the battery issues), waterproof, and feature dual cameras and a high-capacity (circa3500mAh) battery with adaptive fast charging, fast wireless charging and USB-C support. It will run Android 7.0 Nougat, with an update to Android O within a few months of its release. Samsung’s usual sensors – the heart-rate scanner, fingerprint scanner and iris scanner – should all be present.

In terms of core hardware, we know that the Note series is traditionally a slightly more powerful version of the S series that is released earlier that year, though the Galaxy S8 is already expected to be a hugely powerful phone in order to provide the best VR and graphics experience. The S8 is expected to come with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 or next-generation Exynos processor with the ARM Mali-G71 GPU and 6GB of RAM.