The Samsung Note 9: Bigger, badder, and boring

What the overpowered new device says about the bleak future of smartphones

DJ Koh.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

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.

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Navneet Alang

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based out of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt.