Samsung has all but confirmed the Galaxy Note 9 will be announced on August 9. We know the date, we know the time and the place. We’ve seen teaser images. Just the Note 9 name is under wraps. And only a spectacular feat of business illogic would see Samsung abandon the Note series.
However, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that to look at the series’s beginnings. The Note was designed as an experiment, to see if an ultra-large “business” style Android phone could catch on.
“When we originally launched the Galaxy Note series, we had a feeling that business professionals would love it,” says BJ Kang of Samsung’s global planning team. It wasn’t only business heads that turned. Over the years, the Note has come to be regarded as the best handset in the Galaxy line-up.
“The Galaxy Note 2, which was one of the best-selling Note series devices, sold more than 40 million units over its lifetime,” says Neil Shah from Counterpoint Research. “However, since Apple’s launch of plus-size iPhones and also from other Android competitors, Samsung’s Note series have seen a bit of decline and now averages around 25 million units over a lifetime.”
Still, 25 million isn’t bad. And the Note’s reputation has also earned it a subset of Samsung fans, some of whom consider themselves quite distinct from the mass of Galaxy S-series devotees.
Then 2016 arrived. The Galaxy Note 7 received glowing reviews. It was a great phone. But it was also a terrible one. At least 140 confirmed cases of the Galaxy Note 7 battery exploding, expanding or overheating led to a recall of the entire inventory of 4.3 million handsets.
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Estimates of the cost to Samsung range from $3.1 billion to $6 billion. For context, HTC’s revenue for the whole of 2017 amounted to $2.1 billion. It’s the kind of fiscal battering that might sink another company. Most companies.
Airlines banned the Note 7. Samsung had to push out a forced software update that would brick the phones of those who refused to comply with the recall. These headlines cast the Galaxy Note 7 as a public health risk, compounding the damage to the Note name. For Samsung, it was a public relations disaster.
However, just eight months after the latter news stories about the disaster, caused by a lack of internal space leading to eventual weakening of electrodes and a battery short-circuit, Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 8. Towards the end of its first month, Samsung called it the “most successful” Note series launch to date.
It was as if the exploding phone situation never happened. In October 2017 Samsung placed first in a “UK Brand Loyalty Index” report by Sodexo Engage. It beat Marmite, Dyson, Heinz and, yes, Apple. This report was published just a year after the peak of Note 7 debacle.
That the Samsung Galaxy Note has about as close to we get as a USP in tech probably helped: the S-Pen stylus. The Galaxy Note is, and always has been, the stylus phone.
LG announced the rival Q Stylus in 2017, and made similar phones in previous years. But as largely uninspiring mid-range phones sold in limited markets, virtually no-one noticed. The S-Pen may be the most important feature that many buyers almost never use, but it the reason for the Note phones’ existence. And Samsung has reportedly redesigned it for the Galaxy Note 9.
All S-Pens to date used similar core technologies. They don’t have a battery or any active circuitry. Instead, a wire coil winding up from the pen’s tip receives power through a corresponding coil behind the Note’s screen. This is power transfer over electromagnetic inductance, one of the techniques used by the Qi wireless charging standard.
Relatively barebones tech inside the pen makes it smaller. The S-Pen slips into a slot in the phone easily, and is cheaper to replace. At Amazon right now you can buy a replacement S-Pen for under £20. The Apple Pencil costs £89. This is in part because it’s an Apple product, but it also has a battery, Bluetooth transmitter and multiple pressure and angle sensors the S-Pen lacks.
Or lacked. Largely reputable rumours suggest the next S-Pen will have Bluetooth. This means it will need its own battery. Even if the electromagnetic inductance is able to provide enough power for Bluetooth, this would only work when the pen is around a centimetre from the screen with current designs.
A Bluetooth approach would let a pen’s button press act as a gesture key for all sorts of other applications, from metres away. It could fire off the camera, switch slides in a presentation or function as a rather unlikely music controller. Samsung may well add all these contextual functions, integrating them with its own apps where possible. Going slightly overboard with new features is very “Samsung”.
The S-Pen could even function as a controller for virtual reality. Initially this seems unlikely as it would require an accelerometer and gyroscope to track movement. However, in 2015 mCube announced a 3-axis accelerometer measuring just 1.1mm by 1.1mm. It also makes an “iGyro” chip called the MC7030 that fits all the sensors required to track full motion in a 3D space into a 2mm square.
Apple’s Pencil already uses a gyroscope for tilt sensing. Can Samsung fit one into a stylus that still slots into a phone that’s around 8.5mm thick? We’re sceptical. The engineering challenge is significant. However, it’s the kind of enthusiast feature worthy of the Galaxy Note series.
Note phones are also, on occasion, testing beds for features that become a core part of the S-series line-up. It gives them a specific appeal for the enthusiast crowd. The Note Edge, for example, was the first with Galaxy with a display that curved around at the side, now a staple of all top-end Samsung phones.
It had a distinct interface bar for the edge, which Samsung dropped fairly swiftly after most agreed it was rubbish. An under-screen fingerprint scanner is an experimentation candidate for the Note 9 to take on this year. At one point this was an expected feature of the iPhone X. The Vivo X20 Plus UHD was the first phone announced to use this tech. No names big in the west have to date.
Vivo’s phone uses the Synaptics Clear ID sensor, and it operates a little differently to other current designs. Most phones have capacitive finger scanners, which create fine map of the conductivity of your finger. It’s one reason these pads don’t work well if your finger is wet.
Synaptics Clear ID is an optical sensor, a camera of sorts that recognises your finger through the blank space between pixels in an OLED screen. Most who have tried the tech note it’s slower than today’s ultra-fast capacitive scanners. This may also be one reason we haven’t seen it in an important flagship device. The scale of production needs to be considered too. Synaptics announced Clear ID was in mass production in December 2017, but a top-end Samsung phone would chew up 10 million, an iPhone even more.
Will the Note 9 have one? Leaked case designs suggest the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 won’t have an under-screen sensor, but a rear finger scanner instead. And that means all attention is on the S-Pen. This is Samsung’s own strategy, though. Its teaser image for the Note 9 launch is of the phone’s S-Pen button. But what does that button do? We’ll find out soon enough.
Updated 10.07.18, 09:55 BST: The rumored new S-Pen stylus will likely be powered by electromagnetic inductance, not electromagnetic resonance.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
