Samsung Suddenly 'Confirms' Radical Galaxy Note 9

Yes, it’s time to get excited about the Galaxy Note 9. New leaks revealed Samsung is seriously stepping up its game from the more incremental Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus, and now the company is openly teasing the Galaxy Note 9 to the world…

Picked up by Slashleaks, Samsung is now testing the Galaxy Note 9 on Geekbench, and it lines up with everything we expect to see from arguably the company’s most important flagship smartphone.

Identified as the ‘Samsung SM-N960U’ (the Galaxy Note 8 was the ‘SM-N950’), the phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset (likely to be the Exynos 9810 outside the US, sorry America!), a hefty 6GB of RAM and the operating system is Android 8.1 - the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus shipped with Android 8.0.

Read More - Why You Shouldn’t Buy Samsung’s Galaxy S9 (YET)

The tech-savvy may notice the Galaxy Note 9’s Geekbench scores are actually slightly slower than the results for the Galaxy S9 Plus, but don’t panic. Scores during testing are usually lower because the manufacturer is still optimizing both firmware and software.

Of course, it is highly likely that Samsung will ship the retail Galaxy Note 9 with Android 8.1 when - even with an early release planned - the phone will arrive after Google has released Android 9. But that’s normal for Samsung. Given the extensive nature of its Android customization, the company rarely ships phones running the latest version of Android and that’s the price fans have learned to pay if they want Samsung’s cutting-edge hardware.

Right now the Galaxy Note 9 looks set to pull off a couple of significant firsts: the largest battery Samsung has ever fitted to a mass market smartphone and the first mass-market smartphone to feature an in-display fingerprint reader.

The company is likely to need both if it is to stand toe-to-toe with Apple’s upcoming supersized iPhone X Plus...