Longstanding rumors that Samsung is shelving its iconic line of phablets were confirmed this week when the company announced it has no plans to launch a Note family phone this year.
The news made waves in the phone world, and with good reason. Samsung’s unveiling of the Galaxy Note has been a fixture on most tech fanatics’ calendars for years, and offers a mid-year treat ahead of the launch of Google’s and Apple’s respective flagships. Which are expected to be the iPhone 13 and Pixel 6 this year.
The Note line is also undoubtedly the most well-known phablet family in the world, with only Apple’s Max and Plus lines offering equivalent brand awareness. For that reason, many of you might be wondering why Samsung decided to scrap it in favor of the much more niche and younger Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 foldables.
I was initially in this camp as well, my disdain for foldable devices being well documented on the site. But after considering the move, I think it makes perfect sense for one key reason: Samsung never got big enough with the Galaxy Note.
To be clear, I’m speaking literally here. Samsung has always done a great job with the Galaxy Note at the hardware level. For example, last year’s flagship Galaxy Note 20 Ultra was the first mainstream phone to include a truly variable refresh rate screen.
Before that, the original Galaxy Note was a pioneer, offering a then-huge screen and a never-before-seen dockable S Pen stylus. When I unboxed the handset back then, I was genuinely shocked that a company thought a 5.3-inch screen was something consumers actually wanted.
Hands in the air, I got that particular move wrong. Check out the entries in our guide to the best phones and you’ll see that people definitely like big screen phones.
publisher’s Note
But for me, Samsung failed to replicate that initial “wow” factor because year after year it didn’t go far enough with the size of the phone. Last year’s Ultra sure had a whopping 6.9-inch screen, but even that didn’t feel big enough to really take advantage of the Note’s biggest selling point: the S Pen.
As an aspiring amateur digital artist and person who often needs to edit photos on the fly, the S Pen has always had appeal. But to date, every Note phone I’ve tested has proven a bit disappointing due to the device’s pronounced “phone” form factor.
Editing photos in Android’s Photoshop Express app, even with an S Pen, is still a frustrating experience, especially when coming from the larger desktop or iPad versions. The less said about trying to draw something the better, because 6.9 inches isn’t big enough for anything other than light doodling, no matter how responsive and good quality a screen is.
For that reason, it makes sense to me that Samsung is trying to recapture the Note’s potential with a foldable device like the Fold S3, which is intentionally designed to offer a larger and sculpted tablet-sized screen specifically for things how creative work was developed.
The only downsides are that it still has to bypass Android’s woefully populated digital artist app library – which, outside of a nice port of Krita, isn’t nearly as good as Apple’s iPad OS – and my lingering concerns about build quality regarding it folding screens .
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