Remember when Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 started spontaneously exploding and the company was forced to recall every single unit sold — twice — and then cancel the phone entirely? Remember how sensationalists went nuts and said it would be the end of Samsung’s Galaxy Note lineup? Remember how everyone basically forgot about the whole thing a few months later? Remember how the Galaxy Note 8 launched that September and millions of people bought the hot new phone without thinking twice?
Yeah, Samsung’s Galaxy Note series is alive and well. The talk of the town right now is the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ since Samsung just unveiled its new flagship phone duo earlier this week, and there’s no question that these new phones are fantastic. We just scratched the surface in our hands-on Galaxy S9 preview, and we can’t wait to put the S9 and S9+ through the paces for our full, in-depth review.
Of course, now that the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ have been made official, the well of leaks and rumors has run dry… which naturally means it’s time for the first major Galaxy Note 9 leak.
Whether or not you’re a fan of Samsung’s phones, it would be difficult to argue that the Galaxy Note 8 wasn’t among the hottest smartphones of the year in 2017. The phone had killer specs, the best display the world had ever seen at the time, a camera that was easily top-5 in the world, and Samsung’s awesome S Pen productivity features. So naturally, gadget fans around the world are anxious to see what Samsung will cook up for the phone’s sequel, the Galaxy Note 9.
Details surrounding Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9 are scarce for the time being, but the first major leak has now arrived. A benchmark test result on Niels Leenheer’s HTML5 Test site was noticed by the Dutch Samsung fan blog Galaxy Club for an unreleased Samsung smartphone with the model number SM-N960U. As you might recall, the current Galaxy Note 8 available in the United States has the model number… you guessed it… SM-N950U.
There isn’t too much information that can be gleaned from the benchmarks, but there are a few important things we’ve learned. First, and perhaps most importantly, the Galaxy Note 9 is very powerful. At this early stage in the smartphone’s development, it already managed an HTML5 Test score of 522 out of 555. To put that in perspective, the Galaxy Note 8 scored 488 on the same test, and the brand new Galaxy S9 scored 517 — and that was with the more powerful Exynos processor. The SM-N960U is the US-bound version of the Galaxy Note 9, which will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chipset.
Beyond that, the benchmark results show that the phone has a display with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio, which is the same as the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9. The phone is also running Android 8.0 Oreo at this stage in its development, but it’s likely that the Note 9 will be running an updated version of Android Oreo by the time it’s released.
