We are only a few months away from the reveal of the 10th generation of the iconic Samsung Galaxy Note 10 line and the rumour mills swirling around are not painting a rosy picture.
According to Android Police, a source familiar to the company plans learnt that Samsung might drop the headphone jack on the next Galaxy Note model.
This is a huge deal since Samsung is virtually the only big player yet who has stuck with stuffing their high end smartphones with the headphone jack. Ever since Apple decided to *ahem* courageously drop the headphone jack from the iPhone, other players slowly but surely followed suit, except Samsung.
You can even predict what Samsung would say if this happens to be true. They could argue that removal of the headphone jack would create more space for a “bigger battery” or for better “ingress protection”, which is something they’ve successfully done on the Galaxy S10 lineup which have the headphone jack.
Anyway, that is not the only thing that is rumoured to be removed from the Galaxy Note 10. Apparently the Note 10 will also lack physical buttons (power, volume and Bixby buttons) which will be replaced by capacitive or pressure sensitive areas. This is something we have seen been implemented (not successfully) by the HTC U12 but we have to see what Samsung is planning with such a risky move.
That is not all, it is also rumoured that there will be multiple models of the Note line, one larger and one smaller. This is odd since we are used to the Note device as being the singular top end smartphone from Samsung and this change would be quite weird.
This is not surprising at all. Samsung usually uses the Note lineup as a test bench to try out new formfactors which trickle down later on to the Galaxy S line. If this turns out to be true, you can definitely predict the reviewers lamentations of why Samsung decided to follow everyone by removing the headphone jack and the decision to go with ‘virtual’ buttons.
We should expect the Galaxy Note 10 by August which is the usual month Samsung unveils the new generation of Note devices.
