A render depicting what’s said to be a part of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 surfaced online on Wednesday, showing a portion of a device with a curved screen that wraps around its side edges and an extremely thin bezel that’s apparently only 6.7mm thick. The real-life photograph of the handset that can be seen above originally appeared on Chinese social media website Weibo and also indicates that the Galaxy Note 8 will have a single-sensor front camera setup and an iris scanner that Samsung debuted on the now-discontinued Galaxy Note 7 before transitioning it to the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus earlier this year. The image suggests that the South Korean original equipment manufacturer (OEM) will stick with the design language introduced with the Galaxy S8 lineup, with the handset sporting an almost bezel-less design with a so-called Infinity Display, in addition to lacking the company’s branding on the front.
Samsung traditionally made few design changes with Galaxy Note-series devices compared to their Galaxy S-branded peers as the Seoul-based OEM usually opted to increase the screen size and battery capacity of its phablets and equip them with an S Pen stylus while leaving them largely unchanged otherwise. Last year’s Galaxy Note 7 was still somewhat different to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, featuring an improved rear camera, iris scanner, and a differently curved screen on top of the aforementioned changes. According to recent reports, the Galaxy Note 8 will sport a dual camera setup comprising two vertically arranged sensors and a dual LED, dual tone flash unit on its rear panel. The device is said to boast a 6.3-inch or 6.4-inch display panel with a QHD+ resolution that will likely be protected by some kind of 2.5D glass a feature an unconventional 18.5:9 aspect ratio that was introduced with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus.
Some industry insiders previously claimed that the Galaxy Note 8 will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and Samsung’s Exynos 8895 system-on-chip (SoC), depending on the region, in addition to featuring 6GB of RAM and at least 64GB of internal flash memory expandable via a microSD card slot by up to 256GB. Samsung is expected to officially announce the Galaxy Note 8 in August before releasing the handset in September.