So Samsung had their big Unpacked event in New York last week and announced the Galaxy Note 7 (yes, they skipped straight from Note 5 to Note 7, apparently to line the numbering up with the S7, because that's the kind of thing that keeps product managers up at night). Pre-orders opened August 2nd, the phone actually ships August 19th, and I've spent a few days reading through the spec sheet instead of doing anything productive.
The headline feature everyone's talking about is the iris scanner. You look at the phone, it looks at your eyeballs, and supposedly it unlocks faster and more securely than a fingerprint reader. Samsung's marketing is leaning hard into this like it's the second coming of Touch ID. And look, I get why — "your phone can identify you by your literal eyeball" sounds like something out of a spy movie. But I've used enough face-unlock and fingerprint gimmicks over the years to be skeptical that this is going to work reliably in a dim bar or on a bus at 7am when you're squinting into a screen with one eye still half asleep. My money's on most people falling back to a PIN within a month.
That said, some of the rest of the Note 7 is genuinely interesting to me in a way flagship phones haven't been in a while. It's the first Samsung flagship with USB-C, which honestly should've happened a generation ago given how many other manufacturers already made the jump. The S Pen is now IP68 water resistant and pressure sensitive enough to work on the display even when it's wet, which is a weirdly specific but kind of delightful bit of engineering. And it's got a 3500 mAh battery, which on paper sounds like exactly the kind of headroom a phone this size should have.
Price is right around $850 unlocked depending on carrier and storage, which is not nothing, but that's basically where the flagship Android market lives now. Nobody's shipping a $600 phone with these specs and pretending it's a budget device.
Here's my actual gripe though, and it's less about the Note 7 specifically and more about where phone launches are in general right now. Every single Unpacked event, every Apple keynote, every Google I/O demo, has some biometric party trick front and center. Fingerprints, faces, now eyes. It's an arms race of "look what your body can unlock" and increasingly it feels like a distraction from the fact that phones themselves have plateaued a bit. Screens are good. Cameras are good. Battery life is fine-ish. So companies reach for the flashiest thing on the spec sheet to put in the press release headline, and biometrics are flashy in a way that, say, "we improved LTE modem efficiency by 4%" is not, even if the modem thing might matter more day to day.
I'll say this for Samsung though: they at least shipped something new instead of just bumping a camera megapixel count and calling it a day. I still remember when "S Pen" was a punchline (mine from a few years back lived in a drawer, unused, within about six weeks), and now it's apparently waterproof and doing pressure-sensitive sketching. Give it enough years and even the gimmicks get good.
Also, separately, if you've been anywhere near a TV or a group chat this week you know the Rio Olympics opened last Friday. I'm not going to do a big Olympics post because that's not really this blog's lane, but I will say the NBC streaming situation has already been a mess for me — geo-blocked replays, an app that logs you out for no reason, and a cable authentication flow that made me want to throw my laptop into the actual ocean near Copacabana. If any company wants a real engineering challenge worth a headline, "make live sports streaming not terrible" would be a good one to tackle before Tokyo in four years.
Anyway. Note 7 preorders are open if an eyeball-unlocking phone is calling your name. I'm curious enough that I might actually go look at one in person before I decide, which is more than I can say for most phone launches these days.