Update

Obviously, anything they had to say at the announcement is now moot. It’s a terrible pity that the phone had to be recalled but it seems that this sort of problem was an inevitable consequence of so many manufacturers pushing the technology so hard. As of Nov 8th, 2016 Samsung haven’t announced that they’ve found the exact reason for the problem. One hopes they’ll share it with the world so that other companies can avoid it. They’ll probably have to just to sort out their publicity problem. If they fail to announce what went wrong before they launch their next flagship (likely the S8) it’ll be very hard for them to build an audience.

 

The tragedy here is that it had to be the Note series which is already at risk due to Samsungs attitude toward distributing it. The last version the Note 5 wasn’t even sold in Europe because it seems, us Europeans are too dumb to want productivity (possibly true but it sucks to be judged that way). Of course, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if a company refuses to sell their product somewhere it’ll definitely not sell there. They were selling the Note 7 in Europe until it started melting like a witch drenched in whatever kind of acid Dorothy preferred, so it seems they got over that.

 

Maybe those of us who are desperate to get one of the new Notes will get lucky, they’ll fix the problem and release a new version earlier next year than the normal late summer release.

Original Live blog of the Samsung Note 7 Launch Event

 

So the launch event for the new Samsung Note 7 which is set to replace the Note 5 is about to start. Speculation is rampant about the features the Note 7 will include such as an iris scanner, fully waterproof design and 6gb of RAM. There are just over 310,000 people trying to watch this on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpVkeW40pI right now. So far this stream is incredibly dull as we’re already 5 minutes past the start time. Apparently, it’s possible to watch this in VR if you’re lucky enough to have that.

I’m going to update my post live as a test of how this might work for me in the future.

16:05 we start with a nauseating film of people singing a terrible song all over the world. Mysteriously they all seem to be in amazingly impressive locations that show off their cultural stereotypes well. A rodeo in the US, rugby in the UK, people being poor in the 3rd world but they’re all united. Honestly, I don’t want to vomit yet. Oh no wait, they just name checked Rio 2016 and now I definitely want to have a quick puke in the corner.

Oh dear, poor old Samsung exec being asked to give this talk in English. He’s not doing so much more comfortably than last year so clearly Samsung don’t realise this isn’t as fluid as it should be and can’t afford to get him a language coach. Then the feed went down. I don’t think he’s said anything interesting yet… no, definitely not he’s been wittering on about the Olympics a subject so boring that it has actually been used as a form of enhanced interrogation until being withdrawn in favour of waterboarding after tests found it was too brutal even for Republicans in the US to stomach.

16:13 It’s an exercise in defeat the lag. It saddens me that with every advance we make we still can’t reliably stream an event like this worldwide without problems. Just for reference, the only good thing about the block of flats I’m in is that we have fibre to each floor with ethernet to the door and a 100 Mbps connection. So it’s not me, it’s them.

16:15 Iris scanning confirmed – the first useful piece of information. It’s also water resistant though they’ve not gone up to a waterproof category so there’s no leap in tech there. It’s got wireless charging which is also not a surprise for Samsung as they’re ahead of well… really only backwards flagships at this point.

16:17 S Pen – It’s better (more precise and responsive) and water and dust resistant. I think more importantly people will want to hear that they can’t accidentally put it in the storage slot the wrong way around and damage it or the phone (unlike the Note 5).

Then waffle. Corporate marketing speak. He claims that several years ago they committed to bringing VR to the mainstream. I don’t recall that tbh. I don’t remember them standing up previously and saying that all their future flagships would be VR ready and would work in their VR headsets (though they have). Seems like this commitment was something that we had to infer as new models came out.

16:20 The VR presentation starts and those with headsets can now watch. We’re up to 343K watching on Youtube now. There’s nothing going on though just some K-Pop and images of the phone and pen which are presumably in 3D if you have the tech. Pretty sure the music just ended with the dramatic drum riff from Terminator there.

16:22 He’s now holding up a phone. He does this remarkably well, I don’t know many people who would be willing to make a long speech like that in a foreign language they weren’t totally fluent in.

16:24 The next talker is a Yank so he’s not familiar with the language either. Ha ha ha, boom boom! Mostly he’s waffling as they tend to do at these events if they’re not Elon Musk.

16:26 Gorilla Glass 5 on the Note 7 – that’s the first useful thing he’s said. It does have a dual Edge screen, 5.7″ which isn’t a great surprise tbh. They’ve changed the design of their icons and their names for Black, Titanium and Blue. That’s useless in comparison to giving us vanilla Android though, no-one cares if they have tweaked their own bloatware.

16:28 They’ve improved the S Pen – it is much finer 0.8 mm as opposed to 1.6 mm nib (or thereabouts – doing this live is a little tricky). Ok it can activate translation of words now but that’s not really a feature of the pen itself it’s just a way to do what Google can already do for you and access it a bit more easily (which is largely the point of a stylus). Unfortunately they’ve tried to make it easier to make GIFs on your phone so expect more amateurs flooding the web with those.

16:31 IP68 water resistant. That’s no better than any of their previous water resistant phones though. So you still shouldn’t let it get wet for long.

16:32 HDR – looks like it’s going to be able to make HDR video. That won’t make up for my inability with photography and videography though. He thinks I’ll love this but no, not really. I’d love to have it on a TV of size but no such joy yet. More interestingly though they’re bringing HDR content to mobile so presumably the phone can actually display it which is much more useful information. More people will watch then create content. He’s claiming you should be able to get a high quality gaming experience on mobile or console. Well I don’t expect that because it’s not a PC and consoles are an embarrassing mess. The reason mobile games are bad is because they’re not good games, it’s got nothing to do with the graphics. The thing that could useful improve is the controls and you can’t do that with a normal phone.

16:37 It’s a 64Gb phone and you can have an SD card with 256 gb SD card as well so that’s back. That will be a massive seller for them as the S7 did away with SD cards much to people’s absolute horror. The battery is their biggest yet but I don’t think he said how big it was or maybe that was on the screen – the idiots zoomed in on him so we may have missed that. It’s got USB Type C so no wondering which way up your cable should be. It does still have an audio jack which he seems to think is a good thing but actually it’s long past time we stopped using them.

16:40 You get cloud storage space on Samsung Cloud. Who cares frankly. Plus they have security. Well I would hope so. No word on the Android version but they’ll probably make it 6 which will be hugely disappointing. It’s got Samsung Knox. I’ve heard that that’s good and that’s about as much as I care about security tbh. Then again I never lose my phones. It’s got an iris scanner you can use for unlocking it. I think we’ll need reviews of that to see if it’s faster/easier/better than fingerprints. The last time I used one was in a building for door security and it was very slow (but ran on a PC that would be less powerful than this phone). Presumably now it’s amazing. It seems you’ll be able to use the iris scanner for website security. I have to say if that gets into the wider market I’ll be very happy. Who wants to remember lots of usernames and passwords anyway? Or run a clunky password manager?

16:44 – Release date is August 19th and pre-order pages will be up soon. Oh good another dull video. It does claim you can use S Pen while the phone screen is wet which would be very cool – having got soaked trying to get my S5 screen to respond so I could query Google Maps I’m well aware how frustrating it is trying to use a wet phone.

16:46 A new present whose apparently going to talk about services, products and partners. I will be amazed if anything in this will interest me. Some more VR friendly footage. I’m sure it would look good in VR but it’s utterly uninteresting on a flat screen. Omfg she actually just asked for applause for that video. No dear, we just don’t do that.

16:49 As predicted the new Gear VR headset is backwards compatible with the older handsets so it’ll no doubt be more attractive to many users – it’s also got improved lenses and ergonomics as well so it’s actually going to be a bit better.

16:53 Now they’re on to fitness. The Icon X (wireless earbuds) and Gear Fit 2 (fitness band but not really a smartwatch) are talked about but these aren’t new for this event. Apparently Samsung Pay is going well and she thinks that athletes will be able to use it at Rio 2016 though I’d be amazed if anything works at that floundering event. She hasn’t mentioned the Gear Fit 2 protecting you from bio-toxins and pollution or unsafe wiring so I don’t think it’ll help the athletes much.

16:57 They just did a synchronised stage set change and marched out a bunch of people to show the audience the phones. It was very neatly done and shows just how much time and wasted effort they put into these events. Utterly pointless for someone like me as I honestly care about only one thing – what am I getting that’s better for me than was in previous models?

So to sum up there was, as usual, about 15 minutes of worthwhile content in there at best. Some of their Unpacked events launch multiple devices though that’s usually done in tandem with the main phones such as the S7. Fortunately, this was mercifully short.

What did we get confirmed?

Memory: not mentioned as far as I noticed

Storage: 64 Gb with 256 Gb SD card possible.

Security: Iris scanner for unlocking the phone and using with mobile payments and website logins

Battery: Had to check elsewhere but apparently this is 3,500 mah which should be plenty. Unless you’re playing Pokemon Go.

Screen: 5.7″ and HDR capable. No mention of resolution that I noticed. Not that that’s important I suppose. Gorilla Glass 5 which is what you’d hope for given its relatively recent announcement. I imagine that’ll make very little difference in percentage terms but is bound to be helpful to some of us.

S Pen: It’s just better and more precise. No mention of it being any more difficult to damage by inserting it into the holder incorrectly though we have to hope they haven’t done that twice in a row.

Water Resistant to IP68: Basically drop it in a toilet or paddling pool and get it out within 10 minutes and you should be fine. Your hand may be covered in pee, though, less of a problem if you dropped it in the toilet I suppose.

USB Type C: It’s bizarre having to say this but not all flagships that should have gone for this have done so, so it’s nice to see it here. Also wireless charging but no talk about a new wireless charger. I’m still waiting for the next version of Qi which was announced years ago but no-one has used yet – it will allow for charging through a shelf and importantly for stacking devices on top of each other and charging them all. As I understand it that’s a function of the charger, not the receiver though so perhaps we’ll be able to get that before this phone is retired.

Updates After some spec checking

After some time spent on Google, I think I’ve been able to lock down what the specs are.

I’m disappointed to hear nothing about the version of Android. This really should be an Android 7 phone or they should have announced that it will launch with 6 but be upgrade to 7 almost immediately that Google launches it as they’re ready to go the moment Google finalise Nougat. Samsung have badly let me down with their update speed and I’m loath to commit to another 2 years with their technology lagging behind in software as well as having to continue using their bloatware. Fortunately for me, I shan’t be getting a new phone soon as it’s possible they’ll announce a Google Nexus version of it (but unlikely IMHO). If that happened I’d definitely want this as my next phone, primarily for the up to date flagship with added S Pen.

I also can’t help noticing they didn’t say anything about the screen resolution and that’s pretty important for VR – higher resolution for that tiny section you can see will mean better image quality for your VR. Update: The screen is a 5.7-inch Quad HD 2560 x 1440 resolution so it’s not 4K which would have been a nice upgrade but isn’t likely to make much difference in the next couple of years. The most important 4K content is film and availability is limited at the moment. Netflix and Amazon, on the other hand, are broadcasting shows in 4K to some extent but watching them on your phone is overkill.

The SD card will support 256 gb cards which should be more than enough. I found a site referring to it as a 2 Tb card but can no longer find any reference to that so it was probably just based on leaks or guesswork. Also, it’ll be a while before mortals will be able to afford such a large card.

RAM is being reported to be only 4gb which again, is really disappointing. You don’t need more than 4gb I’m sure but they make chips that would have allowed them to go to 6gb and as you’re basically carrying a PC at this point it’d be nice to push up this year. However, it is a new and substantially faster type of RAM so it’s still better than most/all phones that have 4gb of older RAM chips.

Conclusion

I’ve wanted to switch from the mainstream S3 to S7 range for years now. Currently, I’m rocking a rather decrepit S5 which is over 2 years old (ohhh the humanity!). Mostly I want to get onto the Note series for the larger screen and the S Pen. I’m a screen size whore and I don’t mind admitting it outside my Size Whore therapy group. From my perspective, the question should be ‘Where am I going to store this phone and is it too big for that space or my tiny wee Trumpian hands to hold?’. Mine goes, inelegantly even if I do say so myself, in my shirt pocket. If any readers want to point me in the direction of a Kickstarter campaign for a shirt with a cunningly balanced phone pocket that doesn’t tilt alarmingly and look clumsy whilst it’s got a big phone in it, go right ahead. Honestly, though I just want it safe from my keys and change and somewhere I can reach it easily. I love film and TV so a big screen is a bonus. Not to mention what little work you can do on your portable super computer is obviously going to be easier the larger the screen you have. I despair of those who witter on about the weight of phones. Unless someone brings one out that is remarkably heavy it’s not a problem and by that I mean, twice as heavy as the competition. Now if someone manages to give us the same size and battery power for half the weight through some cunning material use with no problems, then I’ll be interested. Mostly though I’d be asking ‘If you’ve managed to make it so much lighter, why didn’t it get a bigger battery?’

See I remember when I got my S2 smart watch people were moaning about how heavy they were. I weighed my old Casio and surprise surprise my new watch, whilst vastly more capable, weighed a lot less than a metal strapped watch. Which weighed nowhere near enough for me to be inconvenienced by it. Presumably, that would need to be around 15 Kgs which would be enough that I might not be able to lift my arm easily. At least for the first couple of weeks and then I’d just get stronger. So if Samsung wants to release the ultra heavy smart watch series with unnecessary battery life and a dual wrist system that forces me to exercise more, I’m all for it. Likewise, my phone is unlikely to become so heavy I’ll be unable to use it easily. A greater concern would be a miraculous leap which resulted in them becoming so light you forget you’re carrying it but I don’t think that’s realistic for the time being.

So clearly I want to upgrade to a Note and I’ve just never got around to it. If I’m able to do so this year that’ll be great as I don’t see any of the competition releasing a phone that has a stylus like this so it’s really in a class of its own. The previous generation lacked an SD slot which was a big mistake and hugely unpopular but they’ve done the right thing and brought them back now. We don’t get a removable battery anymore but that’s easier to cope with now we have wireless charging (you can get battery packs that allow wireless charging). The base storage is 64gb which is good to see as too many phones are straying perilously close to the line where there’s not enough space to install operating system upgrades without first purging your music and app library. The major sticking point for me is the presence of Android 6 rather than 7. It seemed a bit hopeful to think it would launch with it as Google haven’t announced 7 is final yet (though it’s rumoured they will do in the next week or so). However my past experience with Samsung leads me to think we won’t see the new version until the spring and that’s me being optimistic. It’s the absolute worst part of owning Android devices, the fragmentation caused by the irresponsible changes that the hardware manufacturers and phone carriers make to vanilla Android. Google are working to resolve that issue but so far have utterly failed to do so. No-one really wants to find an app on their phone that they can’t completely remove but they still exist. Most importantly it’s those manufacturer changes that prevent you getting security and feature updates immediately that Google release them. That’s neither smart nor desirable in the 21st century. You really don’t want your phone to be vulnerable and nor do you want your portable super computer to be lagging behind in software features.

Still, on balance, I think I will be getting this phone as soon as I’m able to. I won’t do so before I’ve seen plenty of hands-on reviews and comments first, though. I would advise anyone thinking of getting a new flagship phone to wait if they can, a couple of months later the software is usually patched and it doesn’t take long at all before the prices start to drop dramatically. If you’re 3-6 months behind the flagship launches you’re saving a veritable fortune. Probably enough to allow you to upgrade your fitness devices and smartwatches at the same time and you are wearing one, aren’t you?