What you need to know
- The Galaxy Note 20 is reported to be the last Galaxy Note.
- Samsung plans to refocus on foldables like the Z Flip and Z Fold families in 2021.
- The company is also planning to ship the S21 Ultra with an S-Pen.
Samsung has been rumored to be dropping the Galaxy Note line for a while now, but now concrete reports of this have swirled to an unignorable crescendo. Reuters today confirmed earlier reports that the company would be discontinuing the Note line with the Note 20 being the last phone one.
In line wiith our current thinking, Reuters reports that Samsung will instead refocus its efforts on the foldable Z line, while the Galaxy S21 will ship with support for the S-Pen.
While previously unthinkable, the Note 20's demise means a different thing in 2020 than it would have in 2016. Now, with Samsung shipping phones like the S20 Ultra and large screened phones being common, the rationale for selling a discrete big phone line pretty much vanished. Reuters alludes to pricing issues with the Note line also being a factor. Samsung has tried to sell lower-cost versions of the Note line, either with the standard Note 10 and Note 20 series, or the Note 10 Lite. It seems like those weren't enough to save the series.
Writing about the rumors of the end of the Note last month, Android Central's Jerry Hildenbrand said:
Pulling the Note line into the premium version of the Galaxy S line saves Samsung more money than the cost of adding a digitizer would, too. One less phone to build means more time and money to focus on making the Galaxy S as great as it can be as well as freeing time and money to focus on the foldable devices Samsung is betting on like the Galaxy Z Flip 2. And we haven't even reached the point of talking about marketing and presentation dollars. After 2020's poor sales numbers across the entire mobile industry, saving a lot of money is a very good thing.
Either way, the Galaxy Note is no longer where we can see Samsung's vision of the future, look to foldables for that.
