[Tech Flashback] | Samsung Galaxy Note 7 | Remembering the glory days

The magnificent one!

We all remember the amazing galaxy note 7 from 2016. That phone was the bomb, literally! But that's not to say it didn't make an impression on our hearts. So let's take another look at the great Note, by keeping the explosion jokes aside.

Design: There's one word that signifies the note 7 design. Symmetrical. It has curves in both front and the back. It combines the forced display of the S7 edge and the curved back edge of the earlier note 5. So this is the first phone in a while that's so comfortable, even though it has a huge form factor. It feels really nice and thin in the hand but the glass back is still a fingerprint magnet. The back glass panel and the front are made of gorilla glass 5 this time.
The power button is on the right side and volume buttons are on the left of the metal frame, both very clicky and solid. On top, there's a secondary microphone and a sim tray with memory card expandability. On the bottom there's the 3.5mm headphone jack, speaker grill, primary microphone and Samsung's first USB type-C port. The phone is 7.9 mm thick and weighs 169 gms. Not at all heavy for such a huge device.

Too perfect to exist!

Display: Should I really say again that it's awesome? It's a Samsung panel after all! The phone has a 5.7' QHD AMOLED panel with a very high pixel density of 515 ppi. It's bright, it's vivid and well saturated, with punchy colors and great viewing angles. The curved edges give a nice bezel-less look to the phone. What's interesting is that there seems to be some palm rejection going on with the touch sensors on the edges to prevent unintentional touches. It was a major problem until the S7 edge and a very welcome add on to the note 7. You can use the phone without accidently triggering sonething when your palm touches the 'edge' screen. It was my biggest complaint with Samsung curved display phones and now they've silenced me! Even the S pen works on the edges now, which is amazing considering its tip is very thin, at 0.7 mm compared to last year's note 5 at 1.6 mm.

Hey look! A headphone jack!

Performance: There are, as you might know, 2 variants. A Snapdragon and an exynos variant. The Indian, exynos version specs: An octacore exynos 8890 processor clocked at 2.3GHz and a Mali T880 MP12 GPU with 4 GB DDR4 RAM and 64 GB storage. Yeah, it's the minimum storage that can be expanded upto 256 GB. A real treat for power users!. (The Snapdragon variants will get a Snapdragon 820 SoC with Adreno 530 GPU.) It's the same processor and RAM from the S7, but it isn't really a bad thing, as the S7 was already blazing fast. And so is this. It's equipped with game launcher and other goodies that'll make your multimedia experience, something to cherish and remember. There are plenty of new simplifications on the software department and the S pen is better than ever now. To find out more about the S pen and it's awesome new features, visit my blog: dope tech fever.

The new attraction of note 7 in security is the added iris scanner. This is not a Samsung gimmick, trust me guys it really works! It has a dedicated IR sensor and a separate camera to recognise your irises. It's crazy fast and is very very reliable. You can register only one pair of irises. So only you can unlock it which makes it even more secure than the fingerprint sensor. In fact, I would recommend using it over the fingerprint sensor! The infrared sensor is pretty sensitive and powerfully accurate, as a video playback of the registered irises couldn't fool the sensor! You can even unlock it while wearing sunglasses, but it takes some time to penetrate them and scan your iris.

The other new feature is called secure folder, similar to 'parallel space' but better.
You can set your iris scanner as authentication and move your apps into it. The apps in the score folder act as newly installed ones and allow you to have an entirely different account in it. Other than that, the UI has gotten simpler, cleaner and smoother. The Settings app is a bit more refined. Overall it's an amazing phone with near flawless software. Samsung has made it 99% to perfection.

One of the best, as expected

Camera: The note 7 has the same mind blowing camera sensor from the S7/S7 edge. A 12 mp dual pixel sensor on the rear with f/1.7 aperture and a 5 mp wide angle sensor on the front, same aperture. Camera takes the same stellar photos and amazing videos, but there's a new addition called HDR video. It takes better dynamic range on a video footage. Currently it's limited to 1080p and not 4K. Even the display supports HDR content playback. The camera app has been toned down to work with swiped than buttons. A swipe from bottom to top in landscape mode will switch between front and rear cameras. Swipe to the right and you'll find lots of filters. Swipe to the left and you'll open the settings. It's equally fast and responsive as earlier galaxies. No gripes what so-ever.

Sorry, couldn't resist..

Battery: The phone has the biggest battery in any note device till date. It had a 3500 mAh unit with Qualcomm quick charge 2.0 support. I would've liked to see 3.0, but oh well. It's pretty good as it charges half the battery in about half an hour. Battery life unplugged is also very good. Much better than the note 5. You can get up to 6 hrs of continuous moderate usage on a single charge, which is excellent, it's the way a note device should be!

​Price: Well, You know what happened. But hey, there is the same phone with a slightly smaller battery, called the Note FE(Fan Edition). You can get it from china, if you really are a fan!

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