Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Confirmed to Launch in the Second Half of 2017

In January this year, Samsung's mobile chief DJ Koh surprised everyone by confirming that the company will be releasing the sequel to last year's Galaxy Note 7 despite the infamous explosion incidents that tarnished the name of the series. Now, as per the company's first quarter financial report, it seems like Samsung will be releasing the Galaxy Note 8 in the second half of 2017.

Samsung announced its quarterly results for the quarter ended March 31 on Thursday and as part of its announcement, the company mentioned that it will be releasing a "new flagship smartphone in the second half [of 2017]," in its press release. Notably, this sits well within the regular launch timeline for the Note series smartphones as Galaxy Note 5 was launched in August 2015 and Galaxy Note 7 was launched in August last year.

This particular statement from the company indicates that it has decided to stick to its regular launch time frame instead of rushing with its upcoming Galaxy Note 8 smartphone despite the absence of its predecessor device in the market. However, this should come as a relief to customers as in case of Galaxy Note 7 the company ended up bungling on some product safety aspects by pushing for an earlier release, which was speculated to be motivated by the desire to get the smartphone into more users' hands ahead of the release of Apple's 2016 iPhone models.

Usually the South Korean company announces its Note series flagship smartphones ahead of Apple's smartphones but makes them available much later in the year. As the company's apparent impatience with the Galaxy Note 7's release is what's thought to have caused faulty batteries to pass through to customers, it can be deemed a wise move on Samsung's part not to rush the release of the next Note series flagship.

While there were speculations earlier that the Note series of smartphones might be killed off by Samsung due to the bad name associated with it, the statement from DJ Koh indicated that the company might not be done with the device after all. It will be interesting to see how the company will approach the device launch and release this time around.