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Samsung Announces $1,000 Galaxy Note 9 Smartphone With Last-Gen Android Software Out-of-the-Box (engadget.com)
The Galaxy Note 9 touts a slightly larger 6.4-inch end-to-end screen, a 4,000mAh battery that promises "all-day" use, and a minimum 128GB of storage -- there's also a 512GB version that, with 512GB microSD cards, can give you a full terabyte of space. It runs Android 8.1 Oreo -- not Android Pie, which Google and Essential rolled out to some of their devices earlier this month. Engadget: Samsung is also bringing over welcome improvements from the Galaxy S9 family, including stereo speakers and the variable aperture f/1.5-2.4 primary camera (there's a second camera on the back, of course). This year, though, the most conspicuous change revolves around the S Pen. This is Samsung's first S Pen to incorporate Bluetooth, and that lets you do a whole lot more than doodle on the screen. You can use it as a remote control for selfies and presentations, and Samsung is providing a toolkit to let app developers use the pen for their own purposes. And no, you don't need to load it with batteries or plug it into a charger -- it'll top up just by staying in your phone. The base model of the Note 9, featuring 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, is priced at $999. The other variant will set you back by $1,250. Preorders begin on August 10th, and the phone will be available on August 24th at all major carriers or direct (and unlocked) from Samsung. CNET writes about the camera sensors on the new handset: The Galaxy Note 9 keeps the same hardware setup as the Galaxy S9 Plus. That is, dual 12-megapixel cameras on the back, one of them that automatically changes aperture when it detects the need for a low-light shot. (Samsung calls this dual aperture, and it's also on both S9 phones.) There's also an 8-megapixel front-facing camera for your selfies. What's different is AI software that analyzes the scene and quickly detects if you're shooting a flower, food, a dog, a person. There are 20 options the Note 9's been trained on, including snowflakes, cityscapes, fire, you get it. Then, the camera optimizes white balance, saturation and contrast to make photos pop.
Which percentage of space and CPU cycles is used by unwanted and unremoveable apps?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
or you can buy Kindle Filre 8.9" for $60 that does 90% of things Note does.
I know this is normal in Android land, but I don't understand why people are OK with it.
Sorry, couldn't resist..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I won't even buy a desktop computer for $1000.
Another phone with a locked bootloader and full of bloatware and spyware, not to mention the stupid long screen format.
Usually the delay with samsung is from them adding their bloatware, and messing with the kerbnel to make competing apps not work well.
I normally don't care much about phone storage, as usually even the smallest/cheapest phones have gluttonous overkill amounts of storage for doing typical phone things.
Note the qualifier there. The big exception is media: whether you want to store video on it (not my use case so I don't really think about it much) or music (which is very important to me).
It looks like phones are getting to the point where they can actually be good music players even when you don't have network connectivity. The big excuse phone makers have always made for not having hard disks (even though portable devices 15 years ago did have hard disks), is that you can just read your music off the network. And for lots of people in lots of places, that really is a realistic approach. But not so good on a rural car drive, and I'm sure you can think of other cases where getting music from the network is a no-go.
Then people split on how much storage is enough for a music collection. Everyone can afford to be flexible on this too; if it can't store your collection of FLACs, it could still maybe store a derivative in some lossy codec (at the cost of syncing complexity). And obviously we all have different size collections; there's no one right answer.
But anyway, a terabyte just happens to be about the right figure for me. The S9 should be a usable music player, on par (except updated in some ways, e.g. this is solid state instead of a winchester) with the music players of the early '00s.
But a thousand dollars. That's the part that doesn't make sense. I think I'll wait 4-6 months, for when $225 phones have caught up. And you know they will.
Anyway, though, it's good news. Handheld computer solid state storage hitting 1TB is a very nice milestone, IMHO. A lot of my gripes about our retarded technology over the last decade are about to get wiped out. Cheers! *clink*
I mean, Android Pie was just formally released a few days ago. Samsung customizes the OS quite a bit, so I wouldn't think it fair to expect it to show up on their phones for another 3 or 4 months.
I guess if you're one of those who MUST have the latest/greatest of EVERYthing, and you have money to BURN, this could be considered a good deal, but I sure the hell don't.. My phone is a well-used rooted Nexus 5, that I bought for $65 on Glyde, and it uses the Ting MVNO, that saves me a lot of $$$ on monthly charges. I guess to each his own...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
They are UNBELIEVABLY incompetent and uncaring.
There is nothing else to say about a ridiculous, anti-consumer Dickish move like this; done JUST to beat Apple by a few weeks. And that is ALL it is.
Apple needs to make that iOS "Event" date more random, JUST to fuck with Samsung!
They certainly do. The market is flooded with refurbs with Windows 7.
I don't respond to AC's.
I want to buy a phone without Google on it. Does anybody sell a phone with a spyware-free OS?
I don't respond to AC's.
But will it have Bixby, the "lovable, non-removable" assistant?
Make it .6 Inches bigger and call it Nexus 7 Model 3.
I bought a Note 8. It is a fine phone. I WILL NOT, however, pay that much for a phone again. Not even for a Note phone. You can get everything in a Note phone but the pen and it is hundreds of dollars cheaper.
5 year warranty, 5 year guaranteed updates to android latest and patches, a dog and all it's shots.
This sig intentionally left blank.
You can disable Bixby. I have.
I do wish I could find a way to re-purpose the dedicated button, though. It's just wasted real estate now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What will this phone do that an S4 won't? If I had it to do over again I would get more memory, I admit, but does this new phone actually have abilities that the old phone does not? I know it has better cameras and all that, but what is the killer app that would make me want this new phone?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There's no way I'm paying twice as much for my next phone. Fuck $1000 phones!
I picked up an Essential on Prime day for $250 and I could brag that it's 4 / 128, all day battery, running Pie right now, but I'm not updating it's because there's a really good chance that some of the apps that I use every day are not going to work. It would be nice if everything just automatically worked on the bleeding edge, but that's not how it actually goes. If Samsung pushes out an update in one to two months, that may be the best thing for its customers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
seem plenty capable to me. Plus you can just buy the damn thing rather than finance it.
It's almost like you can pickup Android P in a day and port it entirely over to a new device in a matter of weeks!
The M$ responce to that, honestly, fuck you, fuck your privacy, fuck your control over your computer, do as you are told and shut the fuck up before we shut down you down. They want control over you, over you computer, they want to install what ever software they want, when ever they want. They want to monitor all your use of your computer and scan your hard disk drive when ever they want to.
Where do you want to go today?
Somewhere you could never take me.
Chumbawumba, WYSIWYG, Pass It Along.
As a Note 3/4/5/8 owner, I feel the 3 and the 4 were the best.
The Note 3/4.
Had flat screens, which are more practical.
Had 16x9 aspect ratio, which made more sense than the Note 8 screen.
Had home button.
Had flash.
Had user replaceable batteries.
Were lighter.
Pens didn't ruin phone.
No fires.
Samsung has lost its way, and now only caters to gageteers.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
When my s5 finally dies, or someone steals it or whatever, I just want a new S5. Preferably with an OS that's been patched for security reasons.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If you can use the phone without Samsung software on it the value would go back up, but as of now, to me, it's worth nothing except for the metals you can salvage from melting down it's circuitry.
Smartphone?! More like a Personal Augmenter.
VR/AR abilities are coming very soon.
Then, corporate/government (indistinguishable by then) "Big Brother" control kicks-in with full ferocity!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.