Clue's in the name: Samsung's next Galaxy Note line captures scrawls with responsive stylus then punts them over to a PC
- Reference: 1596636072
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/05/samsung_note20_launch/
- Source link:
The new Note20 and Note20 Ultra have all the qualities you'd expect from a premium handset: bright screens, gleaming clusters of lenses that power cunning cameras, bountiful batteries and enough processing grunt to do almost any computing task at speed.
But the Note has long been suggested as the phone that gives busy people an extra productivity boost by including a stylus and note-taking application. Samsung has made its most consequential enhancements to those features. The S-Pen, as the stylus is styled, is now more responsive and works at higher resolution. The Register was able to get hands-on with a pre-release model and can report that it afforded a more faithful capture of the strokes I made on screen and has lost the ever-so-slight lag between wrist action and my scrawl appearing.
But it's the updated Notes app that really makes a difference. It's now possible to record audio while you write and, when reading a note, to tap on written text and instantly advance audio to the relevant moment. This feature will make annotating meetings or interviews a snack. The app can also reinterpret geometrical scratches as regular and symmetrical shapes – that shabby box you scrawl becomes a neat square before your eyes. It's then possible to write text in a separate box and drag it onto shapes, an elegant arrangement that made me think years of frustration trying to label items in Microsoft Word might be behind me. The app can now also develop a model of users' handwriting and learn how to convert it to typed text.
Another frustration eased is the addition of a proper Save function that lets users create custom directories to store notes on internal storage. Android has been rubbish at offering users a filesystem for years and iOS has not been much better. I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on that feature but the demo was a more-than-promising suggestion that the Note20 could make finding documents on Android far more feasible and reduce dependence on cloud storage lockers and their apps.
[1]
The new Samsung Notes app running on the Note20 Ultra. Click to enlarge
Samsung also promised, but did not demonstrate, enhanced integration with Microsoft's Your Phone app that syncs notes taken on the devices with PCs and can also bring half a dozen apps from the Note onto a PC's screen applications with their own windows. If the two companies have nailed this and the custom directories, the Note20 will be wonderful.
Another tantalising newbie was that the smartphone's DeX desktop mode can now be invoked without wires on newer Samsung Smart TVs and any other display capable of screen mirroring.
Samsung is positioning the Note as the phone for the pen-curious and thinks there are more folks like that out there now because pandemic-prodded work-from-home habits are driving people towards premium handsets that let them more easily blend work and play. Galaxy Note devotees are the target for the Note Ultra, with Samsung expecting that rusted-on phablet phreaks won't be able to resist its premium package.
My impression was that both are lovely handsets that will offer years of service, but that at 6.9 inches the Ultra may now be too big for trouser pockets.
Specs
The Galaxy Note20 Ultra offers a 6.9-inch 3088x1440 screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The front-facing 10MP camera looks tawdry compared to the rear-facing 12MP ultrawide camera, 12MP telephone camera and 108MP wide-angle shooter. That's not a typo. It is one hundred and eight megapixels. An unspecified 7nm eight-core CPU at either 3.0GHz or 2.7GHz lies in the engine room. The LTE edition ships with 8GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of storage. Three 5G models all have 12GB of RAM and 128GB, 256GB or 512GB of storage. A 4,500mAh battery is said to go all day.
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The Note20 Ultra's three lenses sit on a plinth of sorts. Samsung's official cases envelop it to prevent snags. Click to enlarge
The Note20 has to make do with a 6.7-inch 2400x1080 screen, 64MP telephoto camera plus a pair of 12MP cameras for ultra-wide and wide angle shots. The sole LTE model offers 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, a spec matched by the high-end 5G model. The 5G cheapie trims storage to 128GB, and a 4,300mAh battery rounds out the package.
Magic beans and the first 5G tablet
Samsung has also shown off its new "Galaxy Buds Live", earbuds that resemble large kidney beans and have no obvious means how to insert them into your ear and no features that suggest they'll stay there.
[3]
Samsung's magic beans. Click to enlarge
Company reps assured your humble hack that when inserted correctly – starting by placing the bottom of the devices in your [4]intertragic notch and then up towards your ear canal – they'll feel right at home. The tiny devices include microphones for calls and active noise-cancelling, speakers and batteries.
Samsung has designed them to be worn all day and made sure the noise-cancelling can tell the difference between ambient noise and chat directed at wearers.
Samsung sanitised the phones and tablets I was able to use but felt it could not do likewise for the Buds so I was unable to try them on. They look marvellous.
Speaking of tablets, the new Galaxy Tab7 and 7+ are refined and impressive. A most useful addition is the ability to extend the screen onto an external monitor and to have the DeX desktop appear on that peripheral because to my mind it means users won't be confined to one work style. There's also an impressive keyboard, a stylus is now standard and everything zips along. There are 11 and 12.4-inch options.
5G is baked in and Samsung claims the new devices are therefore the world's first tablets to include that standard.
In the 15 minutes I spent with the Tabs I felt that their implementation of Android has bent more towards the needs of a tablet user, but may not yet be as refined as Apple's efforts.
All of the above-mentioned gadgets play nice with the new GalaxyWatch 3, which has been made thinner and lighter. In Korea, Samsung has secured approval for the device's use as a blood pressure monitor. The company is seeking the same certification elsewhere. While we wait for that, the company has packed in 120 exercise programmes from notable fit people and ensured the watch will gently encourage you to perform at your best.
And for my final trick, a folding fondleslab?
By now Reg readers will probably have realised that we were given access to these devices before Samsung's big global launch, but only after taking dire oaths that we would not blab before that event. And as we prepared this story under the time constraints Samsung imposed, the company revealed that it will also announce something called the "Galaxy Z Fold2" in 6.2 and 7.6-inch flavours to fold out into something about the size of a tablet.
No further details were made available.
The Note20 and Tab7 ranges will go on sale from 21 August.
The Register has only seen Australian prices so far. US dollar and Sterling prices are typically two thirds of Australian prices.
The prices are:
Note20 Ultra 5G AUD$1,999 to $2,199 depending on memory;
Note20 Ultra 256GB $1,849;
Note20 5G $1,649;
Note20 $1,499;
We're yet to see prices for the Tab7, Buds, Watch or folding fondleslab. But The Register will update this story as those prices emerge. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/05/pr_supplied_galaxy_note20_ultra_samsung_notes_app.jpg
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/05/pr_supplied_galaxy_note20_ultra.jpg
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/05/pr_supplied_galaxy_buds_live.jpg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertragic_notch
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Biometrics crap like the S20?
I suffered crap GPS on my S5 Mini, but had perfect GPS on my S7 and great GPS on my S10e. Other S5 Mini users didn't have GPS woes.
My S7 and S10e device biometrics both work(ed) well.
Sounds like you have a duff device and you should get it exchanged.
2/10
I just watched their "Samsung Unpacked" video, my teeth are gritting.
For example, "The AI makes the latency 9ms, said Token, while reading the autocue. It predicts where the pen will be and coupled to the new 120hz refresh rate makes the pen more responsive, blah blah blah..."
No, the tablet can track the pen, and even 30hz would look smooth if you tracked it properly. Android does everything with bitmaps, so every view has a bitmap it renders into, and these are composited into a single bitmap on the screen. Bitmap is blitted onto bitmap, sometimes hundreds deep, stacking them up into a single bitmap that is rendered onto the screen. Gigabytes of bitmaps are composited on the screen 50 times a second as you move the pen. Of course the hardware cannot do that and it slows down, so it can refresh 10 or 5 times a second. The redraw does not keep up with the pen. Tracking the pen is trivial, updating the screen to reflect where the pen moves is extremely difficult in Android.
Worse the redraw is single threaded, all of this compositing is done on the one thread on the one core.
The fix is to only update the tiny rectangles changed as the pen moves, but if any bitmap in the stack *might* have completely changed (programmers are lazy they call Refresh too often), then the whole stack ends up being composited onto the screen. A screen can be 16MB, and 50 layers would be 800 Mb, so, worst case, nearly 1GB of data is composited on the screen, 50 times a second.
50GB a second? Too much data, it cannot keep up.
You see why graphics cards have such high bandwidths and why Android refreshes can be slow?
How would I fix that?
Well redraw is on one thread, so I cannot multi-thread that one-and-only redraw, but the pen can be tracked by a separate thread so I can track it very accurately very quickly. The screen will lag but the pen will track properly. That won't look good in videos, but it is a sort of fix. Not one marketing will like.
I can also fix the redraw and aggressively force the tiniest rectangle to redraw, and the wider rectangle that I am less certain needs updating? Well I can refresh that at a slower rate. That would be better, but complicated and would have temporary artifacts, and does not appear to have been done.
No, instead, they seem to have estimated where the next point will be, done the full redraw. If the full redraw takes 100ms, and I can estimate roughly where the pen will be in the range 91ms to 109 ms, then I can claim a refresh rate of 9ms. I am estimating where it will be when my redraw finishes, and as long as I'm approximately correct it will appear to be responsive.
Only sometimes my estimate will be spectacularly wrong.
So many things in the Samsung unpacked annoyed me. It seems they are guessing as to what users might want, and disinterested focus groups are telling them where they should head and their hacks are nasty.
Please tell me that connecting the keyboard to a tablet doesn't switch the tablet into Dex mode?, as if you want everything to change when you put it into its keyboard!!!??? I was literally using the tablet and now suddenly, connect a keyboard the fucking thing totally changes into a poor Windows copy? WHY?
/ late / rant
Biometrics crap like the S20?
I had to replace my Galaxy S7 with a Galaxy S20+ three weeks ago, and the biometrics (fingerprint scanner, etc) on the S20+ are complete crap compared to the old S7. After a few days, the S20+ can't recognize my fingerprints nor face, and has to be redone. It's such a pain I just turned off all of the biometrics last week. GPS is crap as well. Seems to keep thinking my home is moving randomly about a quarter of a mile per day. Given the Note line has the same rubbish in it under the hood, I would expect it to be equally crappy.