So the Galaxy Note10 and Note10+ actually went on sale yesterday, August 23rd, and I did the thing I always say I'm not going to do, which is go stand in a phone store on launch day and fondle a device I have no immediate plan to buy. I was at the T-Mobile on the corner near the office during my lunch break, ostensibly to pay a bill, and twenty minutes later I'm holding a Aura Glow Note10+ trying to decide how I feel about it.
Here's the thing that actually got under my skin, and it's not the price (though $949.99 for the regular Note10 and $1,099.99 for the Plus is not nothing, especially with a screen you can't even use without the S Pen at some point rolling around unused in a drawer). It's that Samsung killed the headphone jack. On the Note line. The Note line was the last holdout of "serious" flagship phones that still had one, and now it's gone, replaced by a single USB-C port that does charging and audio and everything else all at once.
I know, I know. Apple did this two years ago with the iPhone 7 and everyone screamed about it and then got over it. I wrote about that here too, actually, way back when it happened, and I remember being pretty annoyed on Apple's behalf-slash-my own behalf. But there was something about Samsung specifically holding the line on this that I'd come to rely on. Every time some tech YouTuber would do their little "can you believe there's still a company that keeps the jack" bit, Samsung got to be the reasonable one. Now that's over.
The box does include a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle, and a pair of AKG earbuds with a USB-C plug already on them, so it's not like you're stranded on day one. But dongles are exactly the kind of thing I lose. I have, in my desk drawer at home, a small graveyard of adapters for phones I no longer own, and I fully expect this one to join them within about six weeks, at which point I'll be standing in a parking lot digging through my bag looking for it while my podcast sits paused.
The other thing everyone at the store kept getting shown by the sales rep was the S Pen's new "Air Actions," where you can wave the pen around in the air to do things like switch camera modes or flip through photos. I tried it for about ninety seconds. It's a neat demo. I do not believe a single human being is actually going to use this as a daily habit instead of just tapping the screen with their thumb like a normal person. It reminded me a little of the gesture stuff Samsung was doing with the S4 camera years and years ago, the wave-your-hand-to-scroll thing, which as far as I could tell nobody used either. Feature demos in a store are a different universe than what people actually do standing on a train platform.
Screen size is the other headline number - 6.3 inches on the Note10, 6.8 on the Note10+ - and holding the Plus next to my current phone made mine look small in a way that's honestly a little depressing. I don't need a phone this big. I also apparently want one, based on how long I stood there tilting it around under the store lighting.
I didn't buy it. I'm not going to pretend this post ends with me walking out with a new phone, because it doesn't - my current one is a year and a half old and works fine, and I have a rule (that I break constantly, but still a rule) about not upgrading a phone before its battery starts visibly struggling. But I wanted to write this down while the headphone jack thing still felt like news to me, because I have a feeling that in six months it'll just be normal, the way it became normal for iPhones, and I won't remember standing in that store feeling weirdly sentimental about a port I mostly stopped using two phones ago anyway since I've had wireless earbuds for a while now. Funny how you can mourn something you weren't even actively using.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about the Note10+, go hold one in person before you decide. The Air Actions gimmick aside, the screen and the pen itself are genuinely nice, and the size difference between it and whatever you're currently carrying is something photos of the phone just don't communicate.