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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ad offers clues about upcoming phone

Follow the video and see if you can figure out the features Samsung is touting for its upcoming Note 7 device.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
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Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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Lance Whitney
Edward Moyer
3 min read
samsung-galaxy-note-7-teaser-video.jpg

A new video from Samsung hints at some of the Galaxy Note 7's features.

Samsung

Thanks to a new teaser ad posted by Samsung Mobile Korea, people curious about Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phone get a chance to play Sherlock Holmes.

The fast-moving clip (embedded below) offers clues to features that the new phone will apparently offer. Your job is to try to decipher them. We'll play Watson and lend a hand.

Posted to YouTube on Wednesday, the clip starts with a quick-cut montage of various ways to unlock a phone: fingerprint scanning, lock-screen patterns. The implication seems to be that such techniques are old hat and that the Note 7 has something more cutting edge in store. Iris scanning, perhaps? (Other clues earlier this month point in that direction.) Korean-speaking sources tell us, by the way, that the caption references "complex" or "complicated" passwords. An iris scanner that unlocks the phone when you look at it would definitely be simpler to use.

After that, the teaser cuts to a young woman lying on a bed and trying to take a sexy selfie with the help of some makeshift lighting. She wields a bare light bulb and has laid out a string of LED holiday lights near her face. Again, rather old-school methods. Could this mean the Note 7 will have a front-facing flash, or that its screen will go all white, a la Apple's iPhone, to provide the necessary glamour lighting? (The caption apparently asks whether selfies are all about lighting.)

Quick contextual aside: In past years, Samsung has been hit by sluggish smartphone sales. But heavy demand for its Galaxy S7 staged a revival in revenue over the past couple of quarters. The company is likely counting on the same rebound to trigger significant sales for the Galaxy Note 7.

OK, back to the sleuthing. Next up, we see someone highlighting words in various old-fashioned, dead-tree books, picking out phrases in Asian scripts and in French, Russian and English. The caption mentions foreign words and memorization. Perhaps those busy highlighter pens mean the Note 7 and its S Pen stylus will include some sort of language feature?

Then we see a bunch of very retro rotary phones sinking in a pool, with a caption that, roughly translated, asks "If you drop it in water, you're screwed?" This one's clear: The Note 7 will reportedly come with IP68 certification, which means it'll be dust resistant and that you'll be able -- should you choose -- to safely immerse it in water at a depth of at least one meter, or more than three feet.

Penultimately (stylish stylus pun intended), we get a series of glowing numbers that counts off from zero to 5 along with a caption that asks whether 6 comes after 5. This scene refers to Samsung's decision to skip the number 6 for its next Galaxy Note and go straight to 7 so the numbering is in line with its flagship Galaxy S7 phone.

And finally, the spot ends with someone simply writing the word "No" on a piece of paper, and then adding a "t" and "e" to make "Note." The "no" seems to be answering all the questions posed by the captions. In other words, with Samsung's new device, you won't need complicated passwords or intricate lighting setups. You won't need to memorize stuff. You won't be hosed if your phone takes a swim. And no, 6 doesn't follow 5, at least not when it comes to Samsung's naming schemes.

This last bit of scribbling leads to the date of August 2016 and a tagline that says, more or less, "It's different from the rest. It's freedom." Samsung has already revealed that it will unveil the next Galaxy Note at a launch event in New York City on August 2.

Got all that? Elementary, dear reader, elementary.

Samsung declined to comment. For more, here's CNET's Galaxy Note 7 rumor roundup.