This is Samsung's first S Pen to incorporate Bluetooth, and that lets you do a whole lot more than doodle on the screen. You can use it as a remote control for selfies and presentations, and Samsung is providing a toolkit to let app developers use the pen for their own purposes. And no, you don't need to load it with batteries or plug it into a charger -- it'll top up just by sitting inside your phone.

Samsung also pitches this as an ideal phone for DeX, with the same multi-windowed interface you saw on the Galaxy Tab S4. You'll only need an HDMI adapter to start using it this time rather than an elaborate dock.

Performance matters as well. The Note 9 will include a 10-nanometer processor (either a Snapdragon 845 or a Samsung Exynos chip, depending on where you live) with a "water carbon cooling system" and AI performance tuning to help keep the speed up for games and other high-intensity tasks. And finally, Samsung is joining the ranks of Android vendors offering more than 6GB of RAM. You'll only get 6GB of memory in the 128GB phone, but the 512GB model packs 8GB of RAM for heavy multitasking.

While the cameras are familiar, Samsung has tweaked the software to provide more "intelligent" features, including object recognition for optimizing scenes (a familiar feature on 2018 devices) and the ability to detect photographic flaws like blurring and smudges.