
Samsung Unveils the Galaxy Note 4 - coreymgilmore
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/galaxy-note-4/
======
walterbell
There's also the Edge variant of the Note 4, with an independent curved
display on the right side, [http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/3/6097297/samsung-
galaxy-note...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/3/6097297/samsung-galaxy-note-
edge-wraparound-display)

 _" The sloping screen’s default status is as a quick launcher of sorts, with
easy access to a bunch of your most-used apps. There are a number of widgets,
though, tickers of sorts that let you flip through news or tweets or
information about how many steps you’ve taken. And you can do it all without
ever changing or disturbing what you see on the larger display. In some apps,
the edge acts as a toolbar, offering easy access to font menus or camera modes
or in-app settings. At night, it can be your alarm clock, the time displayed
on the side of the phone so you can see it without taking your head off your
pillow. It’s an odd idea, turning this vertical rail into essentially an
always-on secondary display"_

~~~
r00fus
> There's also the Edge variant of the Note 4, with an independent curved
> display on the right side

How the hell does Samsung find it sustainable, let alone profitable, to
support all these variations and iterations?

Am I missing something here?

~~~
walterbell
Samsung engineers employ the Russia-pioneered methodology TRIZ to identify
parameters for innovation,
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ)

It's no different than a VC funding a portfolio of startups. Note that their
wildly successful phablet form factor was only one of many in-market
variations. Keep what the crowd/sales identifies as good, discard the rest. If
executive leadership supports research, manufacturing and distribution in
lego/modular fashion, this approach can become embedded in the culture. It's a
statistical approach to creativity.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/03/07/why-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/03/07/why-
is-samsung-such-an-innovative-company/2/)

------
vardump
Still 32-bit? Wasn't this supposed to be a 64-bit model? Not buying. Not going
to update again in 2 years, when apps start to require 64-bit for whatever
reason.

Korean (?) version is Cortex-A53, but international version is 32-bit.

~~~
krisdol
Do these things have enough RAM to need a 64-bit processor?

~~~
vardump
Enough RAM? That's about the only thing why 64-bit processor is not needed in
a phone. 32-bit ARM can support up to 1 TB of RAM.

------
darklajid
Compared a friend's Note 3 to my OnePlus One recently.

I gotta say I found the Note quite nice, I was surprised how good the stylus
worked. I'm not a fan of Android skins (the 1+ wins by a large margin with
official CyanogenMod support here) though, even if some of the additions
looked nice and sensible.

At the moment I'd say both are a little too big for me, but I understand that
this isn't a factor for lots of guys and - well - the phablet features (split
screen, stylus) wouldn't make a lot of sense with a tiny display.

------
RKoutnik
Also of Note: Samsung is entering the VR space with the Gear VR & Note 4:
[http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/03/samsung-virtual-
reality/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/03/samsung-virtual-reality/)

~~~
kumarm
Wow Samsung turn around time is definitely Impressive. Google Cardboard
Giveaway at Google I/O turned into production hardware with software
partnerships in 2 months.

~~~
matthew-wegner
First rumor I could find goes back well before I/O, and certainly was a real
project before that: [http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/22/samsung-vr-
headset/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/22/samsung-vr-headset/)

------
mindcrime
I desperately need a new phone, but I'm torn as to whether or not to wait for
this, or just buy a Note 3. Right now I'm leaning towards waiting, but I wish
they'd given out some more pricing and availability info. :-(

~~~
bane
I was in the same boat until a month ago and got a Note 3, I couldn't wait.
The factory defaults are stupid, but once you get the phone configured how you
like it's pretty awesome.

Here's my micro review of the 3
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264661)

Short answer, the 4 looks like a fairly minor upgrade to the 3. If you're
price sensitive that probably means you can get a 3 at a steep discount pretty
soon (I got mine for $99 on contract) and won't be too disappointing. Spec
wise, the 3 is already ahead of just about anything else on the market. I have
a feeling it'll be a head of the iPhone 6 when that comes out.

~~~
mindcrime
Very cool. A friend of mine has a Note 3 and I've spent some time dorking
around with it, and was fairly impressed. I think if I can find a sweet deal
on a Note 3 I might just go ahead and go that route.

------
slantyyz
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a Galaxy Note that can run a
near-vanilla version of Android without losing S-pen support? The only thing
that ever keeps me from getting one is TouchWiz.

~~~
da_n
On the Note II I was able to load CyanogenMod and the S-Pen worked fine (minus
button support).

------
michaelmior
Ugh. When did TC start autoplaying videos? The pause button is also completely
broken for me so I have no choice but to listen to the whole thing if I want
to read the article.

------
bane
Looks like a really minor refinement of the Note 3. That's not a bad thing, I
just ended up with a Note 3 and love it (beautiful screen, unbelievable
battery life, fantastic speakerphone, impeccable hardware, etc.)

I have a flip cover for it that makes it look like a high-end paper notebook
from a distance and it's a bit narrower and much thinner than my moleskine
notebooks, which is what it's largely replaced. The pen works fantastic even
if the included software is a little funky in some places. It's very low
latency compared to finger input and can even recognize the difference between
the pen and your finger so you can grab the screen without writing on it. I
can write on it about as fine as I can write in my moleskines. The case
replaces the back panel so it doesn't add any thickness to the device except
for the front panel, which has a nifty window that just shows the time and
lets you answer calls without opening it up all the way. It folds around the
back so you can use the phone without it getting in the way.

I showed it to my parents, and my octogenarian Dad, who's been struggling
typing on his iphone (and hates hates hates it and has to use a stylus and
reading glasses to use it at all), has already gone out and bought one and my
mother is planning on upgrading from her flip phone to a Note very soon. Using
it as a notepad is really natural for them, and after I showed them how to
just email a pdf of their notes they were sold.

Battery life is absurd. It's kind of strange what a transformative experience
great battery life has on a phone. It turns your phone from an adversary into
a companion. After heavy usage all day (multiple hours of phone calls and
otherwise almost constantly doing something with it all day) it's usually
above 50% at the end of the day and still has 30-40% by the time I go to bed.

Amazingly, it fits pretty comfortably in my pocket. I don't wear skinny jeans
so that kind of thing is usually not a problem for me. But I do find myself
walking around with my phone more often than I realized. Usually on a call or
something.

The battery is replaceable/upgradeable and there's an SD card slot so I can
plop in another 64GB if I really need to. The camera is pretty good. I'm not
in a habit of taking pictures with my phones, but the few I've taken were as
good as my old point and shoot. I don't like the camera software however,
there's some UI issues with it I think could be done much better.

And oh yeah, it has 3GB of RAM. It's hard to explain what that means for
multitasking, but I used to regularly have apps shutdown in the background
when I was doing something else. Now I can play music, answer and email,
browse for the answer I'm about to type and have navigation running in the
background without worrying something is going to get killed.

My phone is _almost_ as powerful as the desktop computer I recently replaced.
Except it's no in my pocket.

Issues: The Samsung TouchWiz I could live without, as I could with all the
crapware installed by Verizon (there's a couple useful things installed so
it's not a total loss). Some of the defaults are just plain stupid, like
pushing home on the home screen to auto launch some kind of magazine app I
don't want to use. It took a little while to figure out how to kill that
"feature". I also wish the flip case had a lock position to use as a
kickstand. This is something that Apple wouldn't have gotten wrong. It took me
a couple hours to reconfigure the default factory phone into something I can
really use, but it wasn't particularly painful. Performance is off the charts,
GTA 3 plays like a dream on it for example as does Caustic (a CPU heavy soft
synth).

The capacitive buttons also don't light-up by default so you have to know
they're there to push them. Then they light up. It's kind of stupid. They do
provide a menu key on the Note 3, which I love. I don't get the obsession with
moving menus from the dedicated menu button up to some random location in
every application's gui. Fortunately, most apps observe the guidelines and
remove the menu button in the gui and use the phone's button instead. (yeah
yeah, well designed apps shouldn't have menus blah blah, well apps do have
menus and they aren't going anywhere and shuffling the icon around the screen
is worse then putting it under a dedicated button IMHO).

I need more USB 3 cables. Every cable I have anywhere else is one of the old
style USB 2 cables, which works fine with the phone. But being able to
recharge it ultra quick with the 3 cable is really nice.

Unless Samsung really craps the phones up in the future, I'm pretty sure my
next phone in a couple years will probably be another Note.

~~~
Chevalier
Agreed on every count. I love my Note II's size, flip cover, and battery life,
and the Note 4 looks incredibly tempting. That said... a word of caution. I
absolutely loved my Note II when I first upgraded from my iPhone 4 two years
ago, and now I'm starting to despise it.

I rather suspect that Samsung is deliberately hobbling my Note II with
Touchwiz iterations. The phone is drastically slower than it was when I bought
it, despite reformats and careful management of open apps. The camera is no
longer accessible from the lock screen and takes eons to open after unlocking.
Once the camera app is loaded, I have to manually turn on HDR EVERY SINGLE
TIME. And the pictures it takes are pretty terrible -- there seems to be
terrible shutter lag, nearly all photos are now grainy and blurry, and many of
the pictures I take are never saved to memory.

It's inexplicable. I love the phone's display and battery life, and it's still
PERFECT for reading books and articles. But the camera and Touchwiz have just
gotten crappier and crappier.

I'd love to upgrade to CyanogenMod, but unfortunately this is the
international version of the Note II with a proprietary Exynos processor --
Samsung never released sufficient information for CyanogenMod to work
properly. So I'm stuck with Touchwiz and a deliberately crippled phone.

For this reason alone, I think I'm switching back to Apple this fall. The
iPhone camera is still best-in-class, and the camera app is SO fast to open
and use. I just feel stupid paying a price premium for Apple when all Samsung
needed to do was not cripple my camera.

Haha whoops. I started this post with the intention of praising the Note. My
Note II WAS a perfect phablet for its era, but Samsung has deliberately or
negligently crippled my once-beloved phone. Once the phablet iPhone is
released and I find an iOS reader that compares to Android's Moon+ Reader, I
have strong incentive to switch back to Apple.

~~~
bane
I had a similar problem with my Galaxy Nexus. It just got slower and slower
almost to the point of unusability. I think it's a TRIM issue that I'm hoping
is resolved with the Note 3. We'll see.

I don't use my phone camera almost at all, just a personal thing. But the few
times I've used the phone app on the Note 3 I definitely didn't really like
it. The default Google one on the Nexus was definitely better. However, the
image quality is awesome. I'll probably just get a better camera app and use
that instead.

The s-pen has such a potential to be a killer feature, being able to store it
in the phone body itself is enough of a feature to make it useful. Paint apps
are amazing and now I'm no longer finger painting like I'm in kindergarten. If
Samsung could just get their software game together they'd be unstoppable.

I'm _very_ interested in what Apple is going to bring to the phablet market.
If history is any guide, it'll definitely force vendors like Samsung to up
their game. This is a very good thing IMHO. The phablet market has been
Android only for too long and Apple does a much better job picking and setting
trends.

~~~
Chevalier
My only experience is with the Note II, but third-party camera apps are
somehow much worse than the crappy native Samsung camera app. I had high hopes
for the Google Camera app, but they're all fairly terrible... and very few can
do competent HDR. Even the amazing Windows Phone cameras are apparently held
back by crappy camera software/image processing. Only Apple seems to do photos
right, for some reason.

Agreed about the S-Pen. I almost never use it, but my artist girlfriend LOVES
to doodle with it and it makes a ton of sense for walk-and-talk jobs.

Samsung should be applauded for their innovation. When the first Galaxy Note
premiered, every critic insisted that a tiny form factor and fingers-only were
the only correct way to build a phone. To this day, articles on phablets are
filled with hysterics about how large phones are terrible. I just hope that
size innovation won't stop at 5.5-5.7 inches...

~~~
bane
I had an amazing experience earlier today with the pen during a complex phone
conference. I wasn't near my computer and I needed to take a bunch of notes.
Put it on speakerphone, switched to the s-note and got everything written down
without a problem, then just shared the notes I just took as a PDF in my
dropbox so it was on my computer when I got back to my desk.

It's one of the few times in recent years I felt like technology had actually
done something magical for me. In the long long list of things modern
smartphones can replace, a notepad is now absolutely one of them.

It's taking me an effort to fit the s-pen into my workflow, but when I do,
it's usually a good experience. It seems to me to be more a matter of
realizing I have a digital notepad on hand and actually using it than anything
wrong with the tech.

------
frou_dh
Serious screen on that thing. Same resolution as a 2x2 grid of 720p HDTVs.

~~~
mwfunk
In other words, 1080p.

~~~
ChrisClark
In other words, 1440p.

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toblender
Wow... it looks just like the Note 3...

