It saw Samsung working to find new ways to embrace the idea of a mobile-first virtual office in a post-Blackberry world and, perhaps most profoundly, it ushered in the era of the phablet. It helped inject new ideas into a category that was already starting to feel stagnant 4.5 years after the arrival of the first iPhone. Within nine months of launch, the company announced that it had sold 10 million units. The more radical the innovation, the more likely it is to faceplant.īut the Note was a success by any reasonable metrics.

It’s the nature of the beast - and this strange industry in which we find ourselves. You’d have a pretty great track record if you spent your time betting on new innovation to fail. It’s something I think about a lot, faced with new innovations like foldable displays. Samsung rightfully points out such skepticism in reference to more recent devices that received similar pushback, early on. The stylus graced the phone like a vestigial organ - some strange and unnecessary relic from the days of the Palm Pilot we’d collectively (and happily) evolved away from. The 5.3-inch display was unimaginably large in a year when the average screen measured a hair over 3.5 inches. And I certainly wasn’t alone among the crowd at the Messe Berlin that IFA. I fully confess I was a skeptic when Samsung unveiled the first Note.

Samsung galaxy one note