Samsung’s latest smartphone: a reason to spend more

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Richard Drew/Associated Press

The Samsung Note 8, which goes on sale Sept. 15, proves there's plenty of action at the high end.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent $70 to replace the battery on my two-year-old Samsung Galaxy S6, because I saw no reason to pay $750 for a new smartphone. Then Samsung's latest landed on my desk, and suddenly I could see a reason to spend even more — $930 — for a new one.

That's the spectacular starting price of the new Galaxy Note 8. That's much more than most high-end handsets, and $100 higher than its misbegotten predecessor, the notorious Note 7, which came to market about a year ago. That one gained global fame for bursting into flames, due to defective batteries.

You might suppose the higher price went entirely into fireproofing. You would be wrong.

The new Note is bigger than the Note 7, with a more powerful processor, more memory, and a sharper screen. And it's full of enticing features, including a camera that lets you refocus a photo after you've taken it, and a stylus for on-screen scribbling that turns the phone into a true notebook computer.

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But who would pay nearly $1,000 for a phone? The same kind of people who are likely to be lining up in a few weeks to get their hands on the next new iPhone. That one's expected to go for well over $1,000, but nobody doubts that Apple lovers will pay. Indeed, the most recent market data from IDC Corp. of Framingham shows that while overall smartphone sales have flattened, demand for extra-large, extra-costly "phablets" has soared, rising 49 percent last year.

My Samsung S6 was prime hardware when I got it on contract from AT&T for around $700. Two years later, it still gets the job done. In the meantime, phones have gotten a little faster and a little sleeker, with perhaps better cameras. The current premium phone Samsung has on the market, the Galaxy S8, wasn't very compelling.

That phone's Siri-like voice-control system, Bixby, delivered mediocre performance, and its ability to answer questions is far inferior to that of Google Assistant. Smartphones, it seemed, had become like PCs, with hardly a dime's worth of difference between them, much less several hundred dollars.

But the Note 8, which goes on sale Sept. 15, proves there's plenty of action at the high end, where the super-premium phablets play. Here you've got a phone with a 6.3-inch screen, decisively larger than other Samsungs or even the Apple iPhone 7 Plus. Samsung pulls this off by stretching the phone like taffy, rather than widening it.

The Note 8 fits nicely in the palm. Its only physical flaw is the fingerprint reader is on the back of the device. That's a lousy location to begin with, and worse, the elongated shape of the Note makes it hard to reach.

On the other hand, the front is almost nothing but screen. As on several other Samsung models, the screen actually wraps around the phone's edges, enabling fancy features like hidden menus that emerge from the right-hand edge. And, of course, photos and videos look glorious.

Better yet, the Note 8's big screen makes it an excellent notebook. Up to now, I've never liked stylus-based tablets or phones. My already awful handwriting looks worse on a video display, and I hate the slick sensation of scribbling on glass. But the S Pen stylus in the Note 8 has a welcome pen-to-paper feel, and it produces script that's as legible as my writing is ever going to get. And that big blank slab of glass provides plenty of room for scrawling.

My favorite innovation is the Note's dual-lens rear camera: one shoots wide-angle, another telephoto. And there's an optical zoom feature for sharp long-range shots. Also, the camera's software can combine images from the two lenses, to remarkable effect. Maybe you want an object in the foreground to stand out sharp and clear, and to reduce everything else to a blur. The Note 8 camera makes this easy. But if you change your mind later and want to sharpen up the background, the software lets you refocus photos after you've shot them.

All in all, the Note 8 may be just the thing to get people to forget all about Samsung's flaming fiasco.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com.
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