The iPhone 7 Plus might be more than a month away, but Samsung’s more than prepared for it. The South Korean company today launched its new Galaxy Note 7 — a flagship phablet that packs everything you could want in a smartphone and a whole lot more.
The Galaxy Note 7 builds upon the precedent Samsung set with its excellent Galaxy S7 series. It’s just as pretty, with curved glass front and back and a smooth metallic frame, and just as spectacular on the inside. In fact, it’s even better.
Like the Galaxy S7 series, the Note 7 is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 processor and 4GB of RAM. You also get 64GB of internal storage as standard, and a microSD card slot for adding more — plus a 3,600mAh battery to keep it all going.
The Note 7 has a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display just like its predecessors, and it maintains that incredibly sharp Quad HD resolution fans of the series will be familiar with. It’s also the world’s first smartphone with Corning’s new Gorilla Glass 5.
Photo: Samsung
Curved display, iris scanner
Samsung has finally switched to USB-C for the Note 7, which means no more fiddling around with micro-USB connectors. The company has also added an iris scanner that lets you unlock your phone simply by looking at it, and of course the beloved S Pen stylus has returned.
The S Pen has also gained new functionality within Samsung’s latest TouchWiz software. A new Air Command lets you translate text by hovering the stylus above it, and you now have the ability to pin memos to the lock screen.
The Note 7 packs the same stellar cameras as the Galaxy S7. That means you get an insanely fast 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with Dual Pixel autofocus and an f/1.7 aperture, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with the same f/1.7 aperture.
The Note 7 will come pre-installed with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, and it will go on sale on August 19 in Blue Coral, Gold Platinum, Silver Titanium and Black Onyx.
Photo: Samsung
With that gorgeous design, killer specifications, and features like wireless charging and IP68 water-resistance, the Note 7 has already given the iPhone 7 Plus some tough competition. We’ll have to wait until Apple’s new devices land this fall to see if it’s up for the fight.
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
15 responses to “Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 7 is here to tackle iPhone 7 Plus”
Good luck beating the A10 chip performance.
The same boring look as the old Note 5, S7 Edge…..
The iPhone SE A9 will trash Note 7 in performance.
Of course the performance is questionable but the design IMO is awesome….speaking of same look the iphones are practically identical……..
That’s easy to do when the iPhone has an inferior display to power, a less robust OS and zero multitasking ability.
An iPhone that runs less powerful hardware and software is expected to launch an app a millisecond faster than a feature rich Galaxy.
So, the less powerful smartphone will be faster then the most powerful one ?
What should Samsung do in order to fix it’s hardware and the laggy Android performance ? Will 16GB of RAM with 128-bit 32 cores CPU be enough to better any iPhone ? I don’t think so. The always laggy, just like the lack of security, is inherited in Android, and nothing can fix that.
boring design, boring ugly system.
More promising than the iphone 6se or 7…..Atleast it has a headphone jack…..
SO 1970’s!
It is an old standard…However current ios devices do support both lightning based headphones as well as regular headphones with headphone jack….Removing it is the removal of an option..not addition of something new….
Ugh boring and ugly
Not really gorgeous at all. Kinda “meh” as always.
sorry but nothing new except for the iris scanner. nothing exciting.
Great device. Only Problem: it runs Android. C’mon, even if iOS needs a facelift, who wants to fiddle around with android, Windows, Linux and the likes?
Yeah, but no infrared ??? come on! S6 edge was better in this way..
It certainly has an awful lot of features. I’m not certain they’ll all be useful to most users but Samsung definitely wins the feature race by a mile. At least you can see the results of Samsung’s R&D. It’s hard to tell what Apple is doing with its R&D spending. It’s probably being spent on very subtle things that average consumers can’t see. Either that or they’re using R&D money for something else, like executive junkets. Still it would be foolish for Apple to try to copy every feature that Samsung’s smartphones have. Not everyone needs the kitchen sink on a smartphone.