Samsung doesn't pretend like the Galaxy S23 Ultra isn't the spiritual successor to the now-canceled Galaxy Note series. The company embraced this identity, and in some of its online stores for key regions, it even dedicated an entire “Upgrade your Galaxy Note” section on Galaxy S23 Ultra landing pages.
In this section dedicated to Galaxy Note users, Samsung claims it has learned from the past to improve the present. The pages contain a timeline of the Galaxy Note series, starting with 2012 and culminating with the Galaxy Note 20. (via @Aquis_GN)
Although showing the Galaxy Note's history on a Galaxy S23 Ultra page might be unusual, the more intriguing part for fans who know their Samsung history is that the company hasn't shied away from mentioning the disastrous Galaxy Note 7. And up until now, Samsung never seemed too keen to dig out the events that happened around the Galaxy Note in the year 2016.
Remembering a revolutionary but very flawed Galaxy Note
In fact, as Twitter user @Naceron notes (no pun intended), back when Samsung was promoting the Galaxy Note 9, the company pretended like the Galaxy Note 7 never existed. Its promotional slider somehow jumped from the Galaxy Note Edge and the Note 5 to the Galaxy Note 8.
In contrast, Samsung's more recent Galaxy S23 Ultra landing pages for some regions show the correct timeline, in which the Galaxy Note 7 got released in 2016. Granted, Samsung doesn't mention the Galaxy Note FE either, but that device was released in 2017 — the year of the Galaxy Note 8 — to make up for the Note 7 disaster. So, if Samsung wanted to pick only one Galaxy Note model per year for its presentation, it makes sense why it picked the Note 8 over the Note FE.
This doesn't make it any less surprising that Samsung now appears willing to mention the Galaxy Note 7 at all, but maybe time does heal everything. And speaking of learning from the past, the company certainly did, and it greatly improved the build quality of its phones over the past half a decade.
But in case you don't remember why the Galaxy Note 7 was a failure, let's just say it was a missed opportunity. It was a very ambitious phone for its time, but unfortunately, manufacturing and design issues meant that its battery had a tendency to burst into flames.
These weren't isolated cases. Samsung was forced to halt production and suffered the shame of recalling the product shortly after its release. Today, Samsung makes some of the toughest phones on the market, and the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco will probably never happen again. The company did indeed learn from its past. And perhaps enough time went by that the company can now look back at its Note 7 failure without shamefully photoshopping it out of its presentation slides.
