11 years ago in 2011, Steve Jobs proclaimed that a 3.5-inch display is the “right” size for smartphone displays. In fact, he went on to claim that no one would buy phones with larger displays. Just a few months later, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note with a 5.3-inch display, which was considered massive at that time because most of the phones were around 4 inches. To make matters even more interesting, Samsung also shipped the Note with a stylus - something that Steve Jobs himself had famously discarded back in 2007.
Basically, the Galaxy Note did everything against Steve Jobs' idea of a smartphone at the time. And went on to become a massive success and ended up selling over 10 million units in just a short few months. And this is despite the mainstream media making fun of its size. The phone was the first widely successful phablet and inspired practically every smartphone maker to push toward larger displays, including Apple.
Fast-forward to 2021, Samsung decided to end this iconic Note lineup because Samsung was finding it hard to differentiate the S series and Note series, so they decided to give the S series the S Pen functionality and do away with the Note series completely. But the Note fans were pissed, they didn't want a half-baked product like the S21 Ultra with S pen. They wanted a proper Note phone with a built-in stylus. So after months of complaining and petitions, Samsung finally decided to bring back the Note disguised as the S series phone, the S22 Ultra.
Turns out that bringing the Note back was one of the best decisions of Samsung lately according to the latest numbers where the S22 Ultra has topped the chart in the best-selling Android phones for the month of April. As you can see from the sales data of counterpoint research, the top 4 best-selling phones in April were iPhones, with the iPhone 13 leading the charge.
Although Samsung dominates the overall smartphone shipments, it's Apple that dominates the individual phone sales. And that's what's happening here. But what's interesting is the entry of the S22 Ultra in the list. Not only it's the best-selling Samsung phone but the best-selling Android phone in general. This is big because it's the first time in many years that an Android flagship is featured in the top 10 best-selling smartphone list. Usually, Samsung's budget phones make this list but surprisingly that isn't the case this time and this proves that Samsung was right in bringing the Note back or should I say, we, the Note fans, were right in forcing Samsung to bring the Note back.
Moving on, we have some new information about the Galaxy S23. First up, a lot of people were asking whether or not Samsung would bring the under-display camera on the S23 Ultra. Well, South Korean sources mention that it's not happening. The S23 Ultra will again use the punch hole camera which is actually good news considering these under-display cameras still provide potato quality. Next, about the telephoto camera on the Galaxy S23 and S23+. Galaxyclub which has a good track record reports that the telephoto camera on the S23 and S23+ will remain unchanged which means they will still have a 10MP 3x optical zoom camera. The front camera however will see an upgrade to 12MP on the S23 and S23+ from 10MP on their predecessors.
No comments yet