The Galaxy Note7 was an explosive failure. Here's how Samsung could follow it.
Samsung is poised to finally reveal the long-awaited Galaxy S8 next week . But we’re just as excited to see how Samsung will follow up the spectacular failure of last year's Galaxy Note7 -- you know, the phone that kept exploding. The only thing we've heard so far is that there's new Note in development and its working codename is--get this--literally "Great."
A new sketch of a potential Note8 design, along with some specs, was posted to Slashleaks, which might just give us a first look at that much-hyped "great" phone.
The sketch and specs don't get into the nitty-gritty details of what might come with the Note8, but it does provide some insights into the phone's design.
There's an edge-to-edge screen with minimal bezels and no physical buttons, just like the S8. There's a few more features you'd expect in the next generation of the Note, including a slot for an S Pen and what looks like a button for Bixby (Samsung's AI assistant debuting on the S8) on the side of the device below the volume controls. The two circles on the top bezel could be an iris sensor and front-facing camera.
Other ports include a USB-C connector and, wait for it, a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The specs included with the sketch call for a Snapdragon 835 or Exynos 9000-series processor, 6GB of RAM, up to 256GB of built-in storage, and a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with either QHD+ or 4K resolution. That's a stitch bigger than the S8+, which is rumored to measure in at 6.2 inches.
Again, this is just a leaked sketch, so we have no way to determine if it accurately reflects the Note8's final design, or if it's even an official Samsung mock-up. The Note8 has big, burnt-out shoes to fill, so this is just the start of the rumor cycle surrounding what's sure to be a do-or-die effort from Samsung.
UPDATE: March 24, 2017, 9 a.m. EDT A previous version of this article reported the leak first surfaced on cnBeta, not Slashleaks. This has been corrected.
Topics Samsung
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
