/ Samsung Galaxy Note 9

Samsung Galaxy Note 9

 

 

As Samsung President Dong Jin Koh paced around the stage in New York to introduce the company's newest phone on Thursday, it all felt a bit surreal. The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is no doubt an impressive piece of hardware, but we've heard this kind of hyperbole — this is the most powerful phone ever — before. In fact we hear it at every release event, every year.
The first iPhone or even the first Galaxy Note were radically new pieces of technology, but for all its genuinely powerful, novel features, the Note 9 is just another incremental upgrade. This is not really Samsung's fault. The familiarity of the Note 9 instead points to a broader problem facing smartphone makers, and Android manufacturers in particular: Now that the smartphone market is matured, we are starting to hit an upper limit on what the smartphone can do, leaving companies scrambling to try and create the next thing without losing their relevance.

For years, the argument was that the smartphone would get commodified — as ubiquitous and indistinguishable as, say, pork bellies — and there'd be no money it anymore. What happened was that Apple became the biggest company in history on the back of the iPhone. But once you put Apple aside, creeping around the edges of the Android world is the sense that maybe the critics were right — that maybe there just isn't that much to distinguish one Android device from another, and that commodification is exactly what's happening.
That makes the bombastic rhetoric of Samsung's Dong Jin Koh all the stranger. As Shira Ovide at Bloomberg wrote in 2017, there isn't really any point to these flashy launches anymore. Sure, every year there are some novel features, but really, you'll use a new smartphone for what you do now: to text your friends, get directions, watch stuff on YouTube, and play the odd game. And while that's actually pretty great for consumers eager to hold onto their old devices — and not drop the staggering $1,000 it costs to get a Note 9 — it must be pretty worrying for makers of Android phones.