On August 9, Samsung will hold the ‘Unpacked’ event for its upcoming flagship, the Galaxy Note 9. In the teaser video, the company showed the S-Pen stylus, a famous accessory associated with Note series of smartphones. Few days after the announcement, a Russian blogger claimed that the S-Pen will have Bluetooth capabilities. At that time it was not clear what purpose the Bluetooth connectivity will serve, but subsequent reports said that with the stylus users can control music playback as well as use it as a long-range timer to take group photos. A latest development in this direction has confirmed that S-Pen will indeed have Bluetooth connectivity.
A FCC filing clearly mentioned an Equipment Under Test (EUT), which is a “Samsung Portable Handset that operates with the S-PEN in three different inductive coupling modes of S-PEN motion detection and charging operating in the range of 0.53 – 0.6MHz. The EUT was set to continuously transmit to the S-PEN in each of the three modes. S-PEN charging mode is also applicable during the device wireless charging condition.”
This means that the S-Pen will have a Bluetooth connectivity and it will be charged through the phablet itself. However, it is still not known whether the accessory will have rumoured music controlling and long range timer capabilities. It is also possible that the button on the S-Pen will be able to summon Samsung’s Artificial Intelligent assistant Bixby.
Samsung Galaxy Note 9 arrived on US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a month ahead of its usual date. The filing showed that a phone with the model number SM-N960F, along with two additional models, SM-N960F/DS and SM-N960X will be released. The SM-N960F/DS may be a dual SIM version of the device while SM-N960X, a factory-unlocked one. The Galaxy Note 9 is expected to feature an Exynos 9810 SoC (Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 for the variant in the US), 6GB RAM and run Android 8.1 Oreo. The smartphone is believed to feature a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with an aspect ratio of 18.5:9 and backed by a 4,000mAh battery.