Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Launched, Features Curved Display, Iris Scanner (theverge.com)

Another day, another new, shiny new smartphone. On Tuesday, Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 7 featuring a handful of new interesting hardware capabilities. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 sports a 5.7-inch QHD (2560x1440 pixels) display, and is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SOC, 4GB of RAM. It also supports quick charging and quick wireless charging. On the photography front, there's a 12-megapixel sensor on the back, 64GB of internal storage (with support for more via microSD card), and a 3,500mAh battery. The Verge adds: Since the specs are largely the same between the Note 7 and the S7 series, Samsung is differentiating its larger flagship with features. The Note 7 has a new iris scanner that joins the familiar fingerprint scanner and lets you unlock your phone with your eyes. Samsung says the iris scanner is more secure than a fingerprint scanner. It's similar to the Windows Hello login features seen on Microsoft's Lumia 950 and a number of Windows 10 laptops and relies on an infrared camera that works well in low light, but less so in direct sunlight. The iris scanner can also be used to lock apps, photos, notes, and other content in a secure folder, separate from the rest of the phone's data. And of course, the Note 7 wouldn't be a Note without Samsung's S Pen active stylus. The S Pen has been upgraded this year with water resistance, a finer point, and twice as fine pressure sensitivity (4,096 levels, as opposed to 2,048 on earlier models). There a handful of new software features for the S Pen, including a magnifying loupe, quick text translation tool, and a new tool that makes it easy to create GIFs from any video that's currently playing. Samsung has also updated its software interface for the Note 7, with a cleaner color palette, softer white menus, and an overall nicer-looking aesthetic. It seems that with each new phone, Samsung's software gets better looking, and the Note 7 is no exception. The company says that the new software interface will likely come to older models, such as the S7, but it did not provide a timeline for when that might happen. Out of the box, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 runs Android 6.0. No word on pricing yet, but Samsung says it will be higher than Galaxy S7 Edge's $770 retail tag.Update: 08/02 15:46 GMT by M : The unlocked Galaxy Note 7 will retail on AT&T at a price point of $880. Expect similar price on other networks, and for the standalone unit.

Comments

Re:QHD 5.7 in

[Solandri]

There are two ways to go about this. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with one arc-minute of separation.

• Some people interpret this to mean each pixel should be one arc-minute or smaller. If that's your standard, then the pixel size has to be 1 / tan (1 arc-minute) = 3438 smaller than the viewing distance. If you're holding your phone 12 inches from your eye, that corresponds to 286 PPI being all that's needed. That's what the Retina displays target - 326 PPI before the iPhone 6+.
• Other people interpret this to mean you need two pixels per arc-minute. After all, to form a line pair with a separation, you need a row of white pixels with a row of black pixels in between. So then the pixel size becomes 1 / (0.5 arc-minutes) = 6875.5 smaller than the viewing distance. If you're holding your phone 12 inches from your eye, that corresponds to 573 PPI.

It should be noted though that this is for luminosity resolution - your ability to resolve details of any color. This is why printers target 600 PPI - because they print in black and white. Within a specific color, your eye's resolution is substantially worse. Especially for blue, and somewhat for red (the density of your red and blue cones is lower than for green cones and rods). This is the basis behind Pentile displays, which cuts the blue and red resolution in half.* All the bad press coverage they've gotten is by ignorant reporters who compare magnified photos of it completely oblivious that magnifying it defeats the whole purpose. This strategy of reducing red and blue resolution has been used since NTSC video transmissions, and is still used today in JPEG and MPEG encoding. You've been seeing pictures on the web and digital videos all this time with reduced red and blue resolution. If you've never notice this before, then you've basically affirmed that Pentile works.

Anyway, it's a moot point on the Samsung displays because they design them to be used in the Gear VR headsets. Those provide a 96 degree wide angle of view, which to fool 20/20 vision would require 5760 pixels for each eye. Which which correspond to a 11520x6480 resolution display on a 5.7 screen, or 2319 PPI. Any lower than that and you can "see this pixels." This is why the 3D graphics and display screen industries still have a lot of room left to grow, even though CPUs have pretty much hit the point where a low-end CPU is "good enough" for most people's needs.

* The more clever displays take further advantage of this difference between color resolution and luminosity resolution, and use something called subpixel rendering. For an RGB stripe, this corresponds to shifting the "pixel" by 1/3 pixel increments. So if you're trying to display a white dot using two pixels, you actually have 4 possible locations. RGB rgb, rGB Rgb, rgB RGb, and rgb RGB. The problem (for displays you can rotate) is that this extra resolution is only along one axis - usually the horizontal. Windows subpixel rendering for fonts (ClearType) basically turns your 1920x1080 display into a 5760x1080 display for fonts. Pentile overcomes this by using a subpixel layout which is symmetric in both the horizontal and vertical axes. So you can use the same subpixel rendering algorithm regardless of whether the display is in landscape or portrait mode. It really is a superior subpixel layout, which has gotten a bad rap because early implementations had too low a PPI and thus the pixels were visible and lines and fonts were "fuzzy".

This is also why these super-high resolution screens aren't as important for Windows as they are for Macs. Subpixel rendering like ClearType shifts the location of letters by up to 1/3 pixel to make them line up with the subpixel grid. Apple knew their computers were used by most page layout professionals which would find this unacceptable. So their font rendering engine (based o