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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3: The Spiritual Successor to the Note
The title of Samsung’s do-it-all device has changed, an indication of the company’s future mobile direction
One of the phone launches that I will always remember was that of the first Samsung Galaxy Note. The phone stood out from everything else that was available on the market at the time. It sported a massive (for that time) 5.3 inch AMOLED display with a massive battery and a built-in stylus pen. It was big, it was in your face, and it changed phone design forever. The original Galaxy Note went from a one-off experiment to one of Samsung’s most important phone lines and the phone that would give the green light for larger smartphones to be accepted.
With that first phone, the legacy of the Galaxy Note was born. A device that was a showcase of everything that Samsung could do. Always a high-end experience with an industry-best stylus pen. It became so popular in fact, that many have questioned whether it was Samsung’s true flagship as opposed to the Galaxy S series. But as time wore on, there seemed to be some overlap between the two flagship lineups at Samsung. The S series got more powerful and the Note series became more mainstream. This redundancy came to a head around the time of the Galaxy Note 10, a series of devices that felt like the Galaxy S10 from earlier in the year but with a stylus pen attached.
The overt similarity of the S and Note line combined with a global chip shortage in 2020 led Samsung skipping a Note device this year. The skipping of the line this year was met with some understanding in the tech community as the overlap between phones became abundantly obvious. But what the S line has not been able to replicate is the legacy of the Note line. No matter how technically impressive the Galaxy S21 Ultra is, it will never be a Note in the sense of pushing the limits of what we think is possible. It would seem that that legacy has been transferred to a new device. And if this is truly the end of the Galaxy Note line as we know it, it seems that the Galaxy Z Fold is here to carry on that legacy.
