All You Need To Know For Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 August Reveal
If you are a fan of Samsung's Galaxy Note series, you are in for a treat this summer. The next model in the Galaxy Note line, the Galaxy Note 9, is reportedly set to debut in early August at Samsung's Unpacked event in New York, and will include several upgrades over its predecessor. It will of course wield a faster processor, but also a better Bixby experience and improved camera performance.
To start with, it's rumored the Galaxy Note 9 will have an even bigger display, this time checking in at 6.38 inches versus a slightly smaller 6.32-inch display on the Galaxy Note 8. There's also been talk of the Galaxy Note 9 being Samsung's first smartphone with a fingerprint reader built into the screen. That would make it one of the exceptionally rare phones on the market to include that sort of design—there is an obscure phone in Asia that debuted with the feature months ago—and certainly the first from a company with a global footprint as large as Samsung's.
As to the hardware, there are a couple of interesting Geekbench entries that seemingly reveal what Samsung has in store. One of them is a purported Galaxy Note 9 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip (SoC), which is Qualcomm's top-end mobile chip, and 6GB of RAM. As configured, the device scored 2,190 in Geekbench's single-core benchmark, and 8,806 in the multi-core portion. That's in line with (and slightly better than) what we observed with the Galaxy S9+ in our own testing, which scored 2,114 and 8,348 in the single-core and multi-threaded tests, respectively.
More recently, a variant of the Galaxy Note 9 with an Exynos 9810 and 8GB of RAM showed up on Geekbench. It's not uncommon for Samsung to use two different chipsets in its premium phones, typically Qualcomm hardware for the domestic release and its own Exynos hardware for the international model. In this case, the Exynos 9810 variant scored 2,737 in the single-core test, and 9,064 in the multi-core run.
In short, you can expect either a Snapdragon 845 or Eynos 9810 processor alongside 6GB or 8GB of RAM. Storage is said to range from 64GB to at least 256GB, and potentially 512GB. Samsung will also upgrade the cameras on the Galaxy Note 9, though there have not been many leaks or rumors in that regard.
Finally, look the Galaxy Note 9 to introduce a new Bixby 2.0 experience. Details are scarce here as well, though Samsung did previously mention that Bixby 2.0 will offer up more natural language processes, along with improved resistance capability and quicker response times. We don't expect it to be on the level as Google's Duplex demo, but it will be an upgrade over Bixby 1.0. Furthermore, recently said that it's planning to bump its artificial intelligence workforce to 1,000 employees, so this is one area that we expect to see continued improvement.
While nothing has been officially announced, the latest chatter suggests the Unpacked event will take place on August 9.
