At its Unpacked event today in Brooklyn, NY, Samsung announced its latest fall flagship handset, the Galaxy Note9. Just like last year"s model, the device includes a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED 1440p display, that"s nearly bezel-less on the sides.
It comes with Qualcomm"s Snapdragon 845 chipset - at least in the United States - just like the Galaxy S9 does. This means that you can get cellular download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps with the Snapdragon X20 4G LTE modem, and it will have powerful gaming performance with the Adreno 630 GPU.
Samsung is also promising great audio performance, with AKG speakers on the device. This is meant to provide an immersive experience, along with the nearly bezel-less display.
The big camera improvement is an AI camera, a trend that Huawei kicked off with the Mate 10 and LG followed up on with the G7 ThinQ. The device is meant to automatically detect what it"s looking at, and adjust the settings accordingly to take the best possible picture. The sensors should be similar to the Galaxy S9 at 12 megapixels, and they offer Samsung"s adjustable aperture between f/1.5 and f/2.4.
You can actually control the camera with the S Pen, as the Pen now supports Bluetooth. That means that you can set up a group photo and use the S Pen as a remote. You can use it to scroll through PowerPoint presentations, and indeed, Samsung said that it controlled the whole S Pen presentation with the one that it was demoing.
The new S Pen charges while it"s stored in your phone, and a one minute charge lasts a half hour. Like previous S Pens, it still uses Wacom though, which means that it doesn"t need a charge for you to use the actual pen features. The battery is there for the Bluetooth radio only.
Samsung also boasted its DeX features, saying that you can connect to your desktop experience with a simple USB Type-C to HDMI adapter. And of course, you can either control this experience with your phone, or you can hook up a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.
The Galaxy Note9 will be available on August 24, starting at $999.99 for the 128GB model and $1,249.99 for the 512GB model.