Samsung’s Note 8 Will Steal iPhone’s Hottest Feature.. from 2015

Back in September of 2015, Apple showcased the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, which boasted powerful new features like advanced camera hardware, A9 chipsets, and a revolutionary new display technology dubbed 3D Touch. Designed as a functional UI element, 3D Touch enables users to engage with their iPhones on a much deeper level, allowing for force-specific interactions like opening and selecting options on a menu, navigating the text in a field by merely swiping on the screen, and so much more. It’s become a wildly-popular feature for recent iPhone owners, and was most recently the object of speculation as a potential future feature for Google’s Android OS.

Now, it’s been revealed in a report by The Korea Herald that Samsung will be implementing its own form of force touch display technology on the upcoming Galaxy Note 8 phablet, and much like Apple’s ‘3D Touch’ branding for the technology on iPhone 6s models and up, Samsung will ingeniously call its technology “3-D Touch,” too

“Samsung Electronics’ upcoming Galaxy Note 8 has adopted force touch that allows the phone to read the amount of pressure applied to the screen,” South Korea’s ET News reported via The Korea Herald, adding that “The force touch, also called 3-D touch, will use the same solution adopted for the current Galaxy S8 to replace all the functionality of a home button and open a hidden menu with shortcuts to different features.”

The report goes on to suggest that the Galaxy Note 8’s rendition of ‘3D Touch’ technology will use the same force sensitive technology employed in the Galaxy S8 and S8+’ virtual home buttons, which allows for interaction with a variety of virtual buttons designed for onscreen navigation. Whereas the Galaxy S8’s implementation of the feature is limited to the bottom-most portion of the display, however, The Korea Herald report suggests that Samsung will extend the technology to cover the entire surface of the Galaxy Note 8’s 6.3-inch AMOLED infinity display.

While it’s certainly not uncommon for Samsung to copy iPhones most game-changing features, it will nevertheless be interesting to see how this ‘3-D touch’ will work on the Galaxy Note 8 — especially in terms of what force-sensitive features will be accessible through the phablet’s giant display.

Don’t get too excited, though, as unlike Apple, Samsung doesn’t control key design elements of its Android OS, and so this ‘3-D touch’ feature may not even live up to the expectations — you know, seeing as how there’s only so much the company can do with it. Worth noting is that this wouldn’t be the first time Samsung was rumored to showcase a 3D Touch-like display technology, so with a little less than two weeks to go until the Galaxy Note 8 is shown off on stage, we’ll just need to wait and see what this feature is all about before we start casting stones.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]