Samsung Expands Its Galaxy of Stars (Premium)

So, I’ve pre-ordered a Galaxy Note 10, partially because Samsung is offering a particularly good promotional trade-in rate on my Pixel 3XL. But it’s not just that: With this release, Samsung is dramatically expanding its Galaxy ecosystem, and it’s doing so in partnership with Microsoft. And I’m really curious to see where that goes.

As you may know, I spent yesterday traveling home from Amsterdam after a three-week home swap in nearby Hilversum. The flight itself was 8 hours, but the real-world door-to-door travel time was closer to 16 hours: We woke up at 5 am local time, left for the airport at 6 am, and got home in Pennsylvania, after yet another arduous drive from JFK, at about 4 pm ET. It was a long day.

It was also another bit of bad travel-related timing for me: Samsung held its Unpacked event the previous evening at 4 pm ET, or 10 pm Amsterdam time, where it unveiled the Galaxy Note 10, the Snapdragon 8cx-based Galaxy Book S laptop, and its expanded partnership with Microsoft. I recorded Windows Weekly just prior to the event, but with us getting up so early the next morning and needing to finish cleaning the home in which we were staying, I wasn’t able to watch Unpacked until I got home. So I did so, somewhat delirious from travel, last night.

And I have to say, I was somewhat mesmerized, despite the rampant presence of millennial influencers in the event, most of whom were surprisingly lucid and well-spoken. Samsung’s product launch events usually lurch between painfully embarrassing—you may recall one such event that was staged like a Broadway musical for some reason—and just plain boring. But this time around, I felt that Samsung got it right. Even the length—about an hour and 15 minutes—was just right. Something really clicked.

It helps that the products seem interesting, no small feat when you consider how gadget-jaded even the general public has become and how hard it is to advance the state of the art after years of market maturation. I will need to watch the event again to be sure—I had wanted to take notes but was too tired—but what I came away with was that Samsung was highlighting its interesting, Microsoft-like focus on productivity. Rather than adding features for feature’s sake, a Samsung tradition, the company is instead being purposeful.

That was my takeaway, anyway. It could have been the sleep deprivation.

The event, as always, was emceed by Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh, a man who seems to have gotten the job because he’s so goofy and harmless looking. He’s also somewhat hard to understand, at least to my American ears. It reminds of the time I saw Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in the theater in the mid-1990s; it kind of takes a few minutes before I can understand what’s being said and then it suddenly starts to make sense.

But this teddy bear of a man runs the most powerful company in consumer electronics. And while that position has been artificially extended by the U.S. government’s attacks on Huawei, Samsung seems to be making the most of it. In this wonderfully tight presentation, the firm unveiled “latest stars in the Galaxy ecosystem,” the Note 10 (which, for the first time, is a family of phones rather than a single model), the Galaxy Watch Active 2 (which was officially unveiled earlier in the week), the Galaxy Tab S6 tablet/hybrid (an iPad Pro wannabe and the latest in a long list of mostly futile attempts to steal some share from Apple; also unveiled earlier), and the ARM-based Galaxy Book S.

The star of the show, of course, was the Note 10. And it was sold exactly the way that Microsoft would sell it, had Microsoft made such a product. That is, there were a few mentions of gaming, entertainment, and other items that fall on the “life” side of work/life balance. But the Note 10 is really about work. About productivity. About getting it done. This is a device—a device family now—that is aimed at power users, creators, and anyone who needs to be productive no matter where they are or what time it is.

You should watch the presentation, too, to see what I mean. In quick succession, Samsung touted the improvements it’s made to what it calls “the world’s most powerful mobile device.” The specs are all there, of course: Gorgeous and large displays, powerful processors, copious amounts of RAM, and excellent camera systems, plus premium materials and design. The iconic slab-like Note form factor. And the S Pen, which combined with its larger displays has historically set Note apart from the Galaxy S lineup.

But I was more taken with the features that are hard to categorize in a grid of specs.

For example, there are now two Note form factors, the 6.3-inch Note 10, which is the narrowest Note ever, and is physically similar to the Galaxy S10+, and the 6.8-inch Note 10+, which is the biggest Note ever. The sizes of the displays are easy enough to understand, but just having two Note form factors is interesting because Samsung is finally acknowledging that those users who want the best of everything don’t always want a phone that’s the size of a barn door. (Samsung will also sell 5G versions of these handsets.) On that note, ahem, I opted for the smaller model.

The S Pen is always front and center in Note marketing, and Note buyers often cite the S Pen as a key reason they chose the device.

For the Note 10, the S Pen and its related software and services have gotten significant upgrades. Samsung is offering handwriting to text conversion in its note-taking app, plus exporting capabilities for text files, PDFs, and Word documents, marking Microsoft’s first mention in the show, resulting in applause. (When was the last time you saw people applauding a Microsoft Word logo on stage?)

Last year, Samsung added the ability to use the S Pen’s eraser-like top as a remote control for the handset’s camera app, which seems like a fun and useful idea. This year, it enhanced the S Pen with a six-access motion detector that enables air gestures. So you can now switch between photo modes, zoom in and zoom out, and perform other actions remotely while using the camera. That’s even more fun and more useful. And Samsung has opened up an SDK for pen motion controls so that developers can add support to any Android app.

For creators, Samsung is positioning the Note 10 as the ultimate do-it-all device, a handset on which you can both create and edit professional-quality video out in the world. There are unique AR features, many of which require the Note 10+ and its unique 3D-sensing depth-vision cameras, that bind AR objects and effects, including doodles, to real-world objects, including people.

From a traditional productivity perspective, Samsung’s recent Note handsets (and other flagship-class phones) can take advantage of the Dex desktop experience, by which you dock it to display (using a USB-C to HDMI cable) and wirelessly connect to a keyboard and mouse, create a PC-like environment. For the Microsoft fans in the audience, this is much like the Windows Phone-based Continuum functionality that the software giant was pushing several years ago, but tied to a popular platform. (And it has some of the same limitations.)

This year, Dex now works with Windows and Mac laptops, too. So you can connect your Note 10 or other compatible Samsung handset to your laptop with a USB-C cable, run the Dex desktop experience full-screen or in a window, and drag and drop pictures, documents, and other files between them.

Predictably, Microsoft plays a major role in making the Note 10 even more useful for traditional productivity users. The firm expanded its partnership with Samsung such that the two worked on integrated experiences, some familiar and some new, that work between Windows 10 PCs and the new Samsung flagship.

For example, most readers are probably familiar with Your Phone, the Windows 10 app that lets you access your Android phone’s recent photos, text messages, and notifications from your PC, and a coming update that will add Android screen mirroring as well (and with touch support on compatible PCs). But on the Note 10, the two companies take things further. Samsung is adding a Link to Windows button to the Android notification shade, enabling instant access to Your Phone on the PC. And while it is not available yet, Microsoft is adding a Phone capability to Your Phone so that you can send and receive phone calls from your PC. (I have to assume this will come to other phones, too.)

It’s not just Your Phone. Microsoft is also extending OneDrive to sync directly with Samsung Gallery, and the coming OneDrive Personal Vault feature will integrate with the Note 10’s in-display fingerprint reader. And it is adapting Outlook to work with the S Pen, enabling at-a-glance email previews and meeting requests, plus handwriting support. Both OneDrive and Outlook will be preinstalled on the Note 10.

These Microsoft additions to the Samsung flagship are interesting, but they don’t go as far as some of the ideas that Mary Jo, Leo, and I spitballed on Windows Weekly ahead of the Unpacked event this past week. But as the Microsoft presenter noted on stage, this is “the start” of a new collaboration between the firms. And given Samsung’s desire to duplicate as much Google app, software, and service functionality in Android as possible, and its propensity for duplicating built-in Android apps, ceding some of that to Microsoft makes sense. Microsoft makes much better software than does Samsung, and it has a foot firmly in the cross-platform world. And this is great for Microsoft, too: Samsung is, after all, the world’s biggest maker of smartphones, and this partnership will put its apps in front of more people.

But nothing says more about this expanded partnership than the fact that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella actually showed up and gave a short talk on stage towards the end of the event. He didn’t say anything meaningful—he almost never does, folks, sorry—but his mere presence speaks volumes. Yes, it’s possible that Microsoft will play no role in the Note 11 launch next year, just as this year’s event didn’t feature Bixby, the biggest news at the year-ago Note 9 event. (Samsung still hasn’t shipped the silly Bixby smart speaker it promised last year.) But it’s far more likely that this partnership does expand. Koh was obviously excited to have Nadella up on stage with him.

We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m looking forward to trying out the Note 10 and its new Windows 10 and Microsoft ecosystem integration capabilities. More generally, I’m excited to see Samsung picking up the “doers” mantle that Microsoft established previously for Windows 10, and its positioning of the Note 10 as the mobile device platform for that same audience.