Samsung officially launched the Galaxy Note 7 recently, the latest in its line of stylus-equipped flagship smartphones.
Note 7 blends many of the features from last year’s Note 5 with the design and waterproofing of this year’s excellent S7 Edge.
Samsung says that pricing will be commensurate with prior Note devices and will be higher than the S7 Edge, which is about $770 to $800, The Verge reported.
For years, Samsung has differentiated the power-user focused Note line from its more mainstream handsets by adding more specs.
This year’s approach is a little different, however: inside, the Note 7 is indistinguishable from S7 or S7 Edge. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, same 4 GB of RAM, same quick charging and quick wireless charging, and same 12-megapixel camera as the S7 series.
The Note 7 is similarly water resistant and has support for microSD cards, both of which were not present in last year’s Note 5.
The Note 7 has 64 GB of internal storage, compared to S7’s 32GB, and its battery has been increased to 3,500 mAh over the Note 5’s 3,000 mAh cell.
Since the specs are largely the same between Note 7 and the S7 series, Samsung is differentiating its larger flagship with features. Note 7 has a new iris scanner that joins the familiar fingerprint scanner and lets you unlock your phone with your eyes.
And of course, Note 7 would not be a Note without Samsung’s S Pen active stylus. The S Pen has been upgraded this year with water resistance, a finer point, and twice as fine pressure sensitivity (4,096 levels, as opposed to 2,048 on earlier models).
It has added a handful of new software features for S Pen, including a magnifying loupe, quick text translation tool and a new tool that makes it easy to create GIFs from any video that’s currently playing.
Note 7 is launching with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, though Samsung says it will be upgraded to Android 7.0 Nougat in the future. When that might happen is anyone’s guess—the company isn’t committing to a timeframe and it has a history of taking a very long time to deliver new versions of Android to its phones.
After their initial international launch, Samsung phones usually see their way to Iran roughly a month later. Therefore, we can expect the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 here sometime in September.
-
