Dubai: Samsung has launched its most expensive smartphone — the Note 8 – in the UAE on Monday in a bid to gain advantage before other smartphone-makers, especially Apple, launches their flagship devices.
The Note 8 is available for pre-order from August 24 to September 10 and will be available from September 15 for pre-booked customers. It is priced at Dh3,399 but the Korean firm is giving an AKG Speaker worth Dh599 at no additional cost only for prebooked customers. Some retailers are offering additional bundles on top of this to entice buyers.
It will be available at retail stores from September 21.
The 6.3-inch edge-to-edge and bezel-free Super AMOLED Infinity Display screen, with 1440 x 2960 pixel resolution, has the same design as the Galaxy S8.
Samsung joins the dual rear cameras bandwagon and the last major manufacturer to do so with the Note 8. Huawei, Apple, LG, Motorola, Asus and OnePlus already sell phones with dual lenses. The dual cameras are useful in depth sensing and for portrait mode.
The phone houses dual 12MP rear cameras, one with a wide-angle lens with an f/1.7 aperture while the other will be a telephoto lens with an f/2.4 aperture. The front will sport an 8MP camera with f/1.7 aperture. It runs on latest Android Nougat OS.
It houses iris, face and fingerprint scanners and the S-Pen stylus. It will is powered by 2.3GHz Exynos 8895 processor with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage capacity. It supports up to 128GB microSD card.
With the Galaxy Note 8, the new ‘App Pair’ feature lets you create a custom pair of apps on the Edge Panel and simultaneously launch two apps with ease.
Users can pair two apps of their choice to work in multitasking mode where the screen splits into two sections, allowing one to watch YouTube and sending messages at the same time.
In Dual Capture mode, both the rear cameras take two pictures simultaneously and allow you to save both images — one being a close-up shot from the telephoto lens and one being a wide-angle shot that shows the entire background.
Samsung has updated its artificial intelligence voice-assistant — Bixby. It has a dedicated physical button for Bixby. Bixby is officially compatible only with English and Korean voices.
The voice facility can perform actions with voice dictation like “turn off WiFi” or “show me the latest photos or open WhatsApp”.
Currently, it is working in sync with its native applications. However, the company is reportedly working to ensure that the Bixby Voice feature works on third-party apps as well.
Technical details
The S-Pen stylus, with a tip diameter of 0.7mm, is water and dust resistant and has 4,096 pressure sensors.
Samsung has added new features to its stylus such as Live Messages, while allowing it to write off screen memos of up to 100 pages without unlocking the device, and translate text or convert a unit or currency in real time just by hovering over the sentence. Right now, it supports up to 71 languages.
