Samsung's Galaxy Note is no longer the cutting edge "dream phone"
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is here, and it is great in all sorts of ways. All sorts of... expected ways.
But if you are a tech enthusiast gobbling up tech news for breakfast, I won't blame you if you actually find it a bit boring. After all, yes, it's better than the Galaxy S20 Ultra, but mostly because it fixes the flaws of the S20 Ultra, not because of some radical new innovation.
I personally find it hard to call it "the next big thing", the title we are so used to attaching to Samsung flagships. It's just... the next Galaxy Note. A damn good one, yes, with a beautiful design and some notable improvements on the S Pen front, and of course with all the flagship bells and whistles in the form of a top-tier processor, long-range zoom camera and fast refresh rate display. Call me cynical or all you want, but I find it hard to get excited about that: we already have all of that on various other phones in one form or another. And I sure as hell cannot get excited about a notes application in 2020, even if it's the best around (and that was like 10 minutes of the Samsung's big unveiling).
If you are a bit older, like me, you probably remember the times when the Samsung Galaxy Note event was exciting. The times when it seemed like every new device was leaps and bounds better than the previous one. One year, it was about Samsung doubling up on the storage, unlike any other company, another year, it was about a great camera, and yes, one of those years was about an exploding battery, which as bad as it was still felt like a huge story about one of the most radical new phones out there.
In 2020, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is a great flagship phone, and the only one with a stylus, but not as different from the competition as it used to be.
But before you accuse me of all sorts of anti-Samsung bias, I have to make one thing clear: there was another Samsung device that I was genuinely excited about. It didn't have an S Pen inside, nor it was all about note-taking and cross compatibility with Microsoft computers.
It was a device that spoke to that kid that still lives inside of me and hopes for that "next big thing".
That device was the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2.
And yes, I realize it might cost a pretty penny to say the least. The original was priced at nearly $2,000 dollars, and I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung increased the price this year.
But that's a device that offers something genuinely new and exciting. It's a dream phone, a category I just made up for the sake of this article, but one that I think describes it perfectly well.
Unlike the original Galaxy Fold that was off to a terrible start, as it was breaking in reviewers hands days before the big launch, this one feels meticulously well designed. It also seems to have fixed all of the issues of the original: the huge notch on the wide inner screen is replaced with a delicate and tiny hole punch, the hinge has been improved in a big way with mechanical cams like you have on a car and with (I kid you not) vacuum cleaner technology to get dust away, and last but not least, the new Fold is much thinner and now has a big cover screen that you can actually use.
Whether you are just an average user who likes to see their photos and videos on a big, tablet-sized screen, or you are a power user who wants to do more and be more productive, or you are a gamer, the tablet-phone combo that is the Galaxy Z Fold 2 is the one and only phone on my "dream phone" list. Once, Galaxy Note phones used to be there, but I think it's time to move on now.
Of course, keep in mind that the Galaxy Z Fold 2 was only teased today and the official unveiling is expected to happen on September 1st when we will hopefully learn important details about it (such as actually how much it costs...).
Stay tuned for it, I know I will.
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