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New leak shows one way the Galaxy Note 9 is a big upgrade from the Note 8
Sony's Monstrous New Smartphone Camera Sensor Could Make Us Care About Megapixels Again
Samsung will shrink The Wall for your home in 2019

New leak shows one way the Galaxy Note 9 is a big upgrade from the Note 8

Posted: 23 Jul 2018 06:39 AM PDT

Well, Samsung fans, we have good news and bad news for you. The good news is the wait is almost over because Samsung is set to unveil its new Galaxy Note 9 flagship phablet in just two weeks. But the bad news is the Note 9 is shaping up to be just like the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ from earlier this year, minor iterative updates that look almost exactly the same and don’t really offer much in the way of new features.

The response to Samsung’s S9 duo has been tepid at best, and sales have suffered greatly as a result. Samsung fans are seemingly unwilling to pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade to a new smartphone that doesn’t pack any notable new features beyond updates specs and a new camera. That strategy might work for Apple since there are no other companies that make iOS-powered smartphones, but there are obviously plenty of other Android phones to choose from. While it’s true that Samsung’s upcoming next-generation Galaxy Note 9 will be more of the same, a fresh new leak reveals that there is at least one way the Note 9 will be a big upgrade compared to its predecessor.

Thanks to months of leaks and rumors, we know practically everything there is to know about the Galaxy Note 9 at this point. The phone is set to be unveiled at a press conference early next month, and it will then hit store shelves on August 24th. That should give the Note 9 almost a month of sales before Apple’s next-generation iPhones are released, but the extra time might not help very much considering the fact that Samsung fans might not find the Note 9 very appealing.

Samsung’s new flagship phablet will be a solid upgrade when it comes to performance and specs, but the design is nearly identical to the Galaxy Note 8 from last year. Consumers weren’t too pleased with that strategy when it came to the Galaxy S9, and sales took a big hit as a result. The Galaxy Note 9 could suffer the same fate. It’ll pack a new S Pen stylus with some novel features enabled by built-in Bluetooth, but there isn’t much else to speak of as far as worthwhile new features are concerned.

As it turns out, however, there will be at least one area where the Galaxy Note 9 is a huge upgrade from the Note 8. And it’s a very important area, too. According to a new document found on a website run by the Brazilian telecommunications regulatory body Antel, the Galaxy Note 9 will feature a massive 4,000 mAh battery.

The Note 8 includes a 3,300 mAh batter, which is quite small for a phablet these days. The phone’s predecessor had a larger 3,500 mAh battery, but we all know what happened to the Galaxy Note 7 so it makes sense that Samsung decided to play it safe last year. The Note 8 doesn’t have bad battery life per se, but it can be difficult to get through an entire day of heavy use. With the upcoming new Galaxy Note 9, however, that probably won’t be an issue at all.

The image above was posted to Slashleaks, and it shows the aforementioned certification from Antel. The interesting part is about halfway down the page, where you can see that the Galaxy Note 9 has a 4,000 mAh battery. It is beyond impressive that Samsung managed to stuff 4,000 mAh capacity into a phone that’s almost exactly the same size as the Galaxy Note 8. Beyond that, this phone should offer killer battery life when you consider that the 4,000 mAh battery will be coupled with even more efficient next-generation processors from Qualcomm and Samsung.

We have two weeks to go before this is officially confirmed, but Samsung fans can likely expect to get well over a day of battery life out of the Galaxy Note 9 following its launch next month.

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Sony's Monstrous New Smartphone Camera Sensor Could Make Us Care About Megapixels Again

Posted: 23 Jul 2018 07:25 AM PDT

Despite the IMX586's impressive 8000 x 6000 resolution, Sony’s use of “effective resolution” suggests that the size of actual pictures will probably be 12-MP, not 48-MP.

Despite the release of the 41-megapixel Nokia Lumia 1020 back in 2013, over the last few years, smartphone makers have largely featured 12-MP or 16-MP cameras, opting to focus more on improving things like auto-focus speeds and 4K video recording instead of chasing higher resolutions.

However, the mobile megapixels wars may be heating up again with the release of Sony’s new IMX586 smartphone camera sensor and its class-leading 8,000 x 6,000 48-MP resolution.

By shrinking down the size of individuals photo pixels to just 0.8 microns, Sony’s IMX586 is able to cram 48-MP onto a single 8mm diagonal sensor, which is more than small enough to fit into most smartphone bodies.

In daylight, Sony says the IMX586's super high megapixel count should translate into greater details and improved quality when using your camera’s digital zoom. After all, even after cropping in by 400 percent, you’ll still be looking at a 12-MP photo.

And in low light, when camera sensors need to gather as much information as possible, the IMX586 follows in the footsteps of the Huawei P20 Pro’s camera by using a Quad Bayer array to combine adjacent pixels into a 2x2 grid. This effectively increases the IMX586's overall pixel size to 1.6m microns, which is even larger than what you get from the cameras on a Galaxy S9 or a Pixel 2 (both feature sensors with 1.4 micron pixels).

Other features of the IMX586 include full-resolution burst shooting at up to 30 frames per second and true-4K (4096 x 2160) video recording at 90 fps. But ultimately, whether those abilities get implemented on a phone will be up to the device maker, which brings us to another important question: When will this thing be available for real?

Sony announced the IMX586 today, but the company didn’t mention which phone makers have actually pledged to put one in an upcoming device. While we could see something equipped with an IMX586 as soon as this fall, that would mean we’re still a couple months away from seeing how Sony’s hot new camera sensor actually performs.

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Samsung will shrink The Wall for your home in 2019

Posted: 23 Jul 2018 07:53 AM PDT

Samsung The Wall MicroLED — The Wall, Samsung's 146-inch MicroLED-based TV goes into mass production in September.
David Katzmaier/CNET

All you fans of cutting-edge TV tech, it's almost time to start clearing a six-foot-wide spot on your wall for Samsung's 'miniature' version of its MicroLED-based The Wall TV which made a huge splash at CES 2018. A 73-inch-or-so "luxury" model is slated to debut in 2019. The more commercial 146-inch model, which began preorders in June, enters mass production in September, according to President Han Jong-hee, head of Samsung's Visual Display business.

He also said that prices wouldn't be as high as you'd expect, and that with a consumer-focused model it can achieve economies of scale that will allow prices to come down.

MicroLED is the company's new technology for creating any size array from tiny modules of LEDs; usually, the panels are created from a single sheet, which is one reason they tend to come in a standard set of sizes.

The smaller size gibes with what Samsung told us at CES: That its next step after The Wall would be to produce a 75-inch size at 4K resolution. It's tricky because a smaller size requires smaller, more closely spaced LEDs, and Samsung estimated that it would take between two and five years to hit the market. Either Samsung's way ahead of schedule, or it won't actually ship for a while after the official launch.

The smaller model will only be 1.2 inches/30 mm thick compared with the big model's 3.1 in/80mm depth.

Image quality sounds very promising. When he saw The Wall in action at CES, TV expert David Katzmaier said

Black levels looked perfectly black, and combines with the searing light output delivered superb pop and contrast. From any normal seating distance (well, I was standing, but whatever), the image was perfectly sharp, and I couldn't really see any "seams" of the individual modules. So yes, it looks as good or better than OLED, which can't get as bright, based on my limited time viewing it.