Samsung had its Unpacked event on Tuesday and announced the Galaxy Note 7. Not the Note 6. They just skipped it, apparently so the numbering lines up with the Galaxy S7, which came out back in the spring. I get the logic, brand consistency and whatever, but it still feels like the kind of decision that got made in a conference room by someone with a whiteboard and a marker, not because anyone asked for it.
Anyway, the phone itself is actually kind of interesting, which surprised me a little because I've never been a Note person. My buddy Dev has had every one since the Note 3 and I've held them all and thought the same thing every time: this is too big for my hand and too small to be a tablet, so what exactly is it for. The S Pen thing has never clicked for me. I doodle maybe twice a year and it's usually on a napkin.
But a few of the specs on this one are worth mentioning even if you don't care about the stylus.
Iris scanner. You look at the phone, it scans your eyes, it unlocks. Samsung's had fingerprint readers for a while like everyone else, but this is the first time I've seen iris scanning show up on a phone that isn't some weird enterprise device. I have no idea how well it'll work in practice, in bright sunlight or with sunglasses on, and reviewers won't have units in hand for a couple more weeks, so take the marketing demo with a grain of salt. Still, it's a genuinely new thing to try rather than another 2% bump in some benchmark number.
USB-C, finally. This is the first Note to ditch the old micro-USB port. Good. It's about time. My complaint here is entirely selfish: I now own exactly zero USB-C cables and every single accessory in my house, car charger included, is micro-USB or Lightning. So congrats to Samsung for doing the right thing, and condolences to anyone who buys this phone expecting to reuse their old cable drawer.
Water resistance is back, IP68 this time, and, worth noting since Samsung dropped it for a generation, the microSD slot is back too, so you can expand storage again instead of being stuck with whatever tier you paid for at checkout. That's a real win. I was annoyed when they pulled expandable storage a couple years ago and I know I wasn't the only one.
Price is going to land around $850 unlocked, give or take depending on carrier, with preorders open now and the phone shipping August 19th. That is not a small amount of money for a phone. I know everyone says that every year and the number keeps creeping up anyway, but it's still true.
None of this is going to make me switch. I'm perfectly happy with my current phone and the size of this thing alone rules it out for me, my pockets aren't built for a 5.7-inch slab. But I'll admit the iris scanner has me curious in a way most incremental phone launches don't. Most years the new flagship is just "faster processor, better camera, thinner bezels," and you nod and move on. This one at least tried something a little different, even if it turns out to be a gimmick that gets quietly dropped in two years, the way the heart rate sensor on older Galaxy phones basically did.
We'll know more once actual units are in people's hands instead of a stage in Manhattan. I'm curious whether the eye scanner ends up being faster than a fingerprint reader or just a neat party trick you use twice and then turn off. My guess, and it's only a guess, is the latter. But I've been wrong about phone features before — I said the same thing about fingerprint sensors five years ago and now I use mine probably forty times a day without thinking about it.
Also, small aside because I can't help myself: does anyone else think "Note 7" sounds like a name for a printer instead of a phone? Just me? Fine.