Is The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Overpriced?

I watched the UNPACKED 2017 event through YouTube where more than 500,000 people joined in for Samsung’s announcement of the Note flagship. I must say I was pretty impressed by the amount of people tuning in for the event considering the disaster which Samsung faced last year.

The exploding events of the Note 7 and the announcement of the Note 8 had one thing in common, my social media feed was bombarded with news and videos regarding the same product. Such is the hype created by the launch of flagships these days. Only some manufacturers in the mobile segment are capable of doing this, one of them is being discussed here.

I am not going to vent on how good or bad the event was but something that has raised eyebrows in the fan base. Samsung Galaxy Note 8’s retail price of $930/£869 is now more trending than the phablet itself to be clear. Believe it or not, we are looking at a new era in flagship pricing with Samsung starting this revolution.

But wait, hold on a second! Will this pricing have any effect on the sales of the Note 8?

As far as I understand Samsung’s approach with the Note 8, they are going all premium by bringing the best of S8 and combining that with the brilliance of the Note series which was tarnished last year by the Note 7 debacle. But one must understand that accidents like these can happen and should be forgotten.

The Note 8 has everything. The best processor on the market, ginormous 6GB RAM and 64GB storage paired with a gorgeous design and the ever-vibrant Infinity Display. Pair the best of everything with no competition in the market, obviously, the product is going to sell no matter what.

And people buy premium products. It is the same strategy Apple has deployed with the iPhone and all these years it has been working like a charm. I would like to think that the Note 8 is running its own OS considering the amount of work Samsung has put in to change each setting of the Android.

On top of that, they have put in App Pair which allows seamless multi-tasking on the 6.3 inches’ display. When you have such a big phone, you must also utilize the space effectively and this is what they have done.

It is when you start thinking about the little things is how the product stands out. There is no other phone on the market which has these specs and can handle a stylus. And this is the actual selling point of the Note 8. It is actually a better excuse to increase the price of the phablet. Apple’s excuse of the iPhone’s anniversary and a redesign doesn’t seem to satisfy me so far.

If all goes well right now and we are not greeted with any explosions, Samsung has given itself a lot of legroom before the iPhone 8’s launch event on 12th September (unconfirmed). Samsung is also investing heavily on advertising for the Note 8. The Verge had put up a hands-on video of the Note 8 while the event was still in progress. Talk about taking exclusives to the next level.

Also the base storage of the Note 8 is 64GB which is a great improvement from previous flagships (other than the Note 7). This will generally increase the price of any smartphone no matter what.

This graph below shows the general price trend of Samsung Galaxy Note flagships:

That is pretty much the price trend of the Note flagships. As you can see Samsung likes to cut the price of the Note every alternate year. This year however they went against their tradition and the price of the Note 8 went straight up.