So the Note 7 actually ships tomorrow. I preordered mine the same night as the Unpacked keynote back on August 2nd, sitting on my couch with the laptop open, and I still can't quite believe I did it before reading a single hands-on review. Samsung had me at "iris scanner," honestly.
I've been a Note person since the Note 3, which dates me a little, and I skipped the Note 5 entirely. That's not a small thing for me to admit because I don't skip Notes. The reason was dumb but also completely valid: they pulled the microSD slot. No expandable storage, take it or leave it, and I left it. Spent a year on an S6 Edge+ instead, which was fine, but every time I filled up the internal storage with camera files I'd get irrationally annoyed about a decision some product manager made eighteen months earlier. So when Samsung brought the SD slot back for the Note 7 — tucked into the same hybrid tray as the SIM card, which is a little annoying if you actually use both, but I don't — that alone probably would've sold me even without everything else.
And there is a lot of everything else. The S Pen is rated for something like 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity now and it's supposed to work when the screen is wet, which sounds like a marketing bullet point until you remember I write actual grocery lists on this thing standing in my kitchen with wet hands after doing dishes. There's a new "Magnify" tool for zooming into a note and a translate feature built into the pen itself that I doubt I'll use more than twice, but I like that it's there. Dual curved glass on both edges this time too, which the Note Edge sort of previewed a couple years ago with just the one side, and the S7 Edge did earlier this year, but this is the first time it's on a Note with the pen intact.
Price is not nothing. Unlocked it's coming in just under $850, and if you're financing it through a carrier plan you're looking at somewhere in the low $30s a month for two years, which when you actually add it up is more than I want to think about while I'm typing this. I preordered early enough to get the free Gear Fit2 instead of the 256GB card, mostly because I don't currently own a fitness tracker and my current strategy of "walk fast when I remember to" isn't really cutting it.
Part of the reason I'm even paying attention this closely is that I've had the Olympics on in the background pretty much nonstop for two weeks now, NBC's stream buffering in one tab while I read Note 7 impressions in another, which is not a great way to experience either thing. I watched about four minutes total of an actual swimming final and forty-five minutes of a commentator explaining why the stream cut out. Cord-cutting and live sports still don't really get along, and I say that as someone who's been complaining about it on this blog in some form since roughly 2013.
Anyway. The phone ships tomorrow, mine's supposedly arriving Friday according to the shipping estimate, and I'll probably write something once I've actually used it for a week instead of just read about it for two. That's usually a better way to do this kind of post but I wanted to get the preorder anxiety out of my system first. There's a particular flavor of buyer's remorse that shows up around day fourteen of waiting for a package, right before it arrives and you forget you ever doubted yourself.
One more thing: if the iris scanner turns out to be a gimmick I will absolutely be the person who says so, loudly, in the next post. I've been burned by fingerprint sensors that only worked in perfect lighting before. No reason to assume this is different just because it's new.