Samsung kills the Note, so the Galaxy S22 Ultra can fly

The Note is dead. After more than a decade, Samsung has officially closed the book on the transformative phablet. The brand will still exist, but only in a kind of liminal marketing capacity. “We're thinking more and more of the Note as the experience,” a rep told me on a recent briefing call.

As the Note is laid to rest, a familiar figure emerged from the shadows of today's Unpacked event. Like a well-worn soap opera plot where a character tragically dies, but the actor (still under contract) emerges — deus ex machina — as the identical twin the writers never cared to set up on previous seasons. This, friends, is the Galaxy S22 Ultra.

The premium end of the Galaxy S line could easily do the Lucille Ball/Harpo Marx mirror bit with its tragically departed sibling. In the lead up to today’s event, I had the opportunity to fiddle around with (and photograph) the new device. I wasn't entirely sure from early images, but having now used the product a bit, I can confidently tell you that the Galaxy S22 Ultra is a Note in every sense but name.

It's true that the company has spent the last several generations blurring the lines. The Galaxy S line kept creeping up in size, culminating with the addition of S Pen functionality last year on the Ultra model. Of course, S Pen compatibility without the S Pen slot is — to put it politely — inconvenient. So you go and add a stylus slot into the phone and bam, you've basically got another Note on your hands. In spite of the two lines' shared DNA, the look and feel of this is 100% Note, right down to the rounded edges.

I'd have gone with the Samsung Galaxy S22 Note — or hell, just the Galaxy Note 22. My suspicion is that there's stronger brand recognition with Galaxy Note than Galaxy S, but I'm no marketing expert. If I was, I would probably have a yacht with a name like “Top of the Funnel” or something. But alas, someone at Samsung decided the Galaxy S line was strong enough to absorb the Note brand into quiet oblivion. Well, aside from the aforementioned references to the “Note experience” as a sort of vague descriptor for the world of stylus-based notetaking.

Branding is complicated and Samsung makes a lot of phones. With its foldables graduating to flagship status, the company is opting to consolidate things a bit on that front, and ultimately absorbing the Note into the Galaxy S line made more sense than the other way around. It's not a full Note takeover of the S devices, however. Stylus function is still Ultra-only, and the company tells me it's likely to stay that way, in order to maintain a line between the models.

The Note line has been extremely effective in re-popularizing the stylus in a post-iPhone world — more so than I think most of us ever expected. But at the end, it's still a relatively niche piece of the overall smartphone puzzle. And, among other things, adding the Wacom digitizer to the display panel and integrating the stylus adds to the cost of the product.