Rumour mills can bury now. Samsung has made Galaxy Note 5 official today at simultaneous press events in London and New York City. As expected, the new Note adopts the new design language and materials Samsung tried out with the S6 and S Edge and no one complaints about it. So shedding the polycarbonate shell, the new Galaxy Note 5 is now clad in metal and glass enclosure and features the signature of the Note series, the S Pen that now packs more functionality. While the display of the Note series has grown in every iteration, Samsung has put the stopper and retained the 5.7-inch Quad HD (1440 x 2560 pixels) Super AMOLED display size. Again true to their pedigree, the Note 5 is also a beast in terms of specs. It boasts of a Exynos 7420 chipset with a 14nm FinFET octa-core processor with four Cortex A57 cores running at up to 2.1GHz, and four more power-efficient A53 cores clocked at up to 1.5GH, 4GB of RAM, Mali-T760MP8 GPU. Incidentally, the Note 5 is Samsung’s first phone to be equipped with 4GB of RAM. There is a choice of 32 / 64GB. The downer? There is no expandable memory slot and surprisingly, Samsung does not talk about 128GB for the power users. Similarly, the 3000mAh battery is non-removable too. Again pushing the envelope further, Samsung has introduced fast wireless charging and the battery as company claims would go from zero to full charge in 2 hours flat. Weighing 171grams, the dimensions of the phone are 153.2 x 76.1 x 7.6mm. Similar to the Galaxy S6, there is a finger print sensor that can be touched to activate. When we talk about the Note series, obviously the core focus is on the S Pen functionality. In Note 5, unlike the previous generations where we have to pull the S Pen from its slot, you just need to give it a gentle push and it pops out via a spring-loaded mechanism. It should be much easier this way. It also comes with set of new features. The main pick of course is the option to write notes right from the lockscreen. Yes, with the phone sleeping and without need to unlock you can just jot down on the black screen just like any piece of paper. The Note 5 is also the first phone from Samsung to handle Samsung Pay. Initially to debut in US, it could work in any place and support any card as it works on both Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) and Near-Field Communications (NFC) for transaction.
