I few weeks ago, after a long history of purchasing Samsung phones (S4, S6, s7 edge plus) because of the good hardware, I got an S8+ after my S7e+ abandoned me. This was the turning point where I decided I could no longer accept such awful software experience. Now there is even a physical button for their garbage assistant. The Android notifications are broken in favor of small things that do not allow you to read the message from Whatsapp or Telegram or whatever, and so forth. I returned the S8+ and switched to a Google Pixel 2 XL and it is the best phone I've ever had. Samsung needs to get its shit together and understand that even if in their fantasy world where the management live they want to compete on services, it is totally impossible and actually they are just destroying the Android experience. If it was not for the software approach Samsung takes, I bet we could have far less Apple iPhone users.
I agree. Samsung makes great cameras and good hardware (Bixby button notwithstanding), but their software is unacceptable. I get that Samsung still dreams of gradually replacing Google services with its own, thus providing a reason to buy Samsung instead of Pixel/whatever, but they're so bad at it.
They have a reason to buy theier stuff over Pixel phones, its called their hardware. The Pixel 2 compared to an S8 / Note 8 hardware wise is a nonstarter - the Pixel is a larger, clumsier, slower phone with a worse camera and more wasted bezel space.
They actually sabotage their own hardware with their awful software. More Pixel 2s are sold than would otherwise be because people hate Touchwiz and all their bloat crap that much.
You blasting the Pixel 2 for having a worse camera seems to indicate that you have no idea what you're talking about (likely on the other points as well).
Do not trust DXOMark, they are a pay-to-win service. I made a mistake of buying an Xperia Z5 because of DXOMark ratings and it has much worse camera than my Lumia 1020 with much lower score.
I don’t have an iPhone 8 but was looking at the photos thinking oh the pixel 2 looks so much better, only to realise I was looking at iPhone 8 photos.... photo quality is very subjective these days the quality different is just not that different for either pixel or iPhone to stand ahead without it being subjective to the person comparing.
Any sources to back up your claim that the Pixel 2 is slower than the S8? They have the exact same SoC, so performance differences should be negligible.
Absolutely not. I just stopped using a Galaxy S8 and moved to the iPhone X purely because of day-to-day responsiveness, which the recently released Oreo update has made worse. My original Pixel, however, was far smoother during the same tasks.
Seriously.. This obsession with thinner, bezel-less flimsy phones that look good only until the first time you drop it at a height greater than 2cms; Its cancer, causing manufacturers to make phones that are objectively worse from the viewpoint of ergonomics (these phones are very slippery and easy to drop), reliability and battery life.
I would pick a sturdy rugged phone over these cinderella phones any day of the week.
small bezels are important to people because it essentially means a bigger screen inside the same dimensions. I have an iPhone 7 Plus because of the bigger screen, but i feel the overall footprint is ridiculously large for the size of the screen. The iPhone X has the perfect size while the display is still the same or even slightly bigger.
Fair enough. Especially In the case of the iPhone there seems to have been a lot of 'wasted' vertical space that could have otherwise been used for the display (albeit requiring a different aspect ratio). But my point still remains - Is the 1-2mm of extra screen space afforded by an edge-to-edge display really worth it? For me at least the answer is no.
I've never had a phone that I've felt confident using without a case, bezel-less or otherwise. I personally like bezel-less phones because I get more screen space for a phone that's just as durable (in a case).
Whereas I've never used a phone case, feeling that it would negate the point of slim phones. I'm pretty confident with not dropping them though, as that had not yet happened since the dawn of smartphones. Nexus 4 with its glass back would slide off slippery surfaces by itself though, but gladly never broke.
Clumsy cases absolutely destroy the elegance of these beautiful devices.
I'm not as confident about dropping them though.
However the Samsung Galaxy A3 I use has proved to be very durable.
Among casual drops, it has sustained multiple drops to stone floors from considerable heights and being violently thrown across the room (not by me).
The aluminium casing has some small dents and the Corning Gorilla Glass 4 screen has a few small scratches. Otherwise it's still in excellent condition.
Depends on the case I guess. I got a mid-sized case from Otterbox, which has slightly raised lips at the top and bottom of the case so it's quite unlikely that the screen hits the floor first.
Also, at least with the S8 series, the curvature is a lot less aggressive than Samsung's earlier curved screen phones (S7 edge series).
I upgraded a few weeks ago from a Nexus 5X to a Galaxy S7 (non-Edge). The two things I miss from the 5X are the fingerprint scanner location (The iPhone-style 'home' button / scanner combo on the S7 is a bit more fiddly, although the scanner is quicker) and the bezel at the side. It's far too easy to get false touch inputs along the edge of the screen, turning a click into a pinch zoom etc. Bezels aren't necessarily bad on a multitouch screen.
That's funny, I have the exact same complaints about bezel and unwanted edge touch inputs after moving from HTC Incredible S to Nexus 5X a month or two ago. :) I guess it all goes continually downhill, and has been for a while.
Yeah, I did get it occasionally with the 5X too, but it's definitely easier to accidentally press the base of your thumb onto the edge of the screen on the X7. All in the name of it looking nicer in the display window, I guess.
Having an S8, I'm actually considering moving away from Samsung and getting a phone that actually still has a bit of a bezel on the sides - assuming I can find another phone that has what I care about (SoC, RAM, storage, at least IP67, and wireless charging). I have a major problem with the S8 screwing up because the thumb/palm touching the side of the screen when I'm holding it.
Personally I prefer Samsung's OS to stock Google. Most bad behaviour and bloat comes from third party Android apps and Samsung includes better tools to detect battery drain and deny apps background processing. They also provide other features not found on Google phones, such as Knox Secure Folder (and Google were late to the party with split-screen and a file manager).
Thanks, I'm with you on this. I have the S8+ and I greatly prefer their UX to the stock Android; iirc, certain things like screen brightness controls and volume control have been ahead of stock also. Battery life is awesome also.
S9 looks awesome, a notable refinement over the S8. Stereo speakers and that camera! Let's not forget Samsung retaining the headphone jack either, a major win for those who prefer quality non wireless headphones. Having said that, I wonder if APTX-HD is supported by the S9 now.
We just sold ours; they are good, although somewhat bass heavy. Overall a great package for the price.
I find headphones a very personal thing... Being an Audio Technica fanboy I have ANC9 for work (relatively fantastic audio quality/office sound cancelling, with Soundblaster E5), ADG1X for gaming + MSR7NC for music at home (on Soundblaster ZXR) - the latter being an indulgence so that I could have a pair of closed sets whilst working if noisy in the house, with a tiny amount of noise cancelling. Different qualities for different uses.
For the go I have the IM02s, but tips aren't the best so I'm currently using the AKGs that came with the S8+ (with Comply foam tips) - they work quite well.
What about the issue with being able to read notifications?
I'm planning to buy an S8+ or similar soon, since its so much cheaper than Google Pixel, which isn't really officially sold here in Brazil (I loved my Nexus 5 though).
OP mentions: " The Android notifications are broken in favor of small things that do not allow you to read the message from Whatsapp or Telegram or whatever, and so forth.".
Ah thanks, sorry - I don't use either of those, but notifications work just fine for me with Slack, Hangouts, normal messages and all. You can customise notifications and where they may appear on a per application basis.
Mine's on Android 7.0. Samsung aren't too keen on pushing out updates in Australia in a rush; the telcos (Telstra) take their own sweet time too. That's where Apple has them soundly beat. Although, having said that, given last year's update history, perhaps Samsung's model is better after all - I rarely get breaking changes pushed down.
the worse part of samsung's OS is the homescreen IMO, luckily, you can swap it out with something else but I imagine most users do not really know this.
"If you look at the reason that the iPod exists, it's because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn't do the appropriate software, couldn't conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod's really just software. It's software in the iPod itself, it's software on the PC or the Mac, and it's software in the cloud for the store. And it's in a beautiful box, but it's software. If you look at what a Mac is, it's OS X, right? It's in a beautiful box, but it's OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it's software." - Steve Jobs (2007)
IMHO, 80's and 90's Japanese hardware gave me a much better experience than anything from a software company. For example, everytime I go to use my Sonos box, it wants to update the app, the firmware, or both. The constant software updates fix bugs and security holes, but they also bring unwanted features, frequently interface changes and attempts to upsell more of the same.
I still have a Rotel poweramp from 1985 in my front room which the Sonos is plugged into, working flawlessly. There's no chance my Sonos box will still be working past 2050.
Keep things modular: get something like a Raspberry Pi with a USB soundcard and plug that into your good ol' amp.
Using that with shairport-sync to cast to a Woburn speaker gives me more than adequate results and I'm not even using a USB DAC nor digital audio output via HDMI, just the Pi's basic line-out.
Yup. I never touched Apple's portable stuff during the iPod/iTunes era.
I found these products and force-fed management software absolutely horrid. I didn't even want iTunes on the family computers, or a dependency on Windows. I maintained a couple of old desktops for my siblings, for very basic Linux desktop appropriate tasks, as in browsing and OpenOffice (I didn't believe in Linux on the desktop and I still don't, for my own use).
So, an mp3 player that didn't let me transfer and/or play my meticulously organized mp3 and/or FLAC collection was just plain cancer in my opinion.
As a teenage "family sysadmin" I made sure everyone got USB mass storage compatible mp3 players and used media library software like Winamp 5 or Amarok (the original branch that's currently known as clementine) for media management.
The way iTunes was intrusive is of course why it worked for ordinary folks, who didn't have a "sysadmin" like me. But iTunes was such as piece of flaming garbage it couldn't even remove dead/missing files from its media library database automatically.
It's amazing how bad iTunes remains, and I've never used it for music. I mostly like Apple's approach to things these days, now that my time is worth money. The only thing iTunes does well in my opinion is that it takes disk image backups of iOS devices, an essential part of why I now use iPhones, but that's another story.
However, the iPods/iTunes had their good points, none of which I didn't understand at the time. The iPod, if memory serves, never ever rebuilt its media database on its own. That was the job of the iTunes software, for the sake of optimization and keeping the iPod system lean, pleasant and fast (please correct me if I'm wrong).
This philosophy remains visible with Apple's Airport Wi-Fi base stations to this day. Apple base stations do require a proprietary Windows or Mac utility, which was a non-starter for 19-year-old me. But the Airport utility still basically uploads conf files to the base stations, which run pretty nice and slimmed down NetBSD based firmware.
In retrospect, it was smart of Apple not to do stupid bullshit like vulnerable and memory bloating web interfaces on base stations. Those Airport base stations are solid, and by the way, a decade-old models are still supported with updates. The listening daemons available on Airports, Airplay, Apple's lossless (!) music streaming, since 2004 (!), and printer sharing, never had to compete for RAM.
Anyways, at the time, in the early-mid 00s, the only benefit I saw in being in the iPod ecosystem was early adoption and universal support of AAC as the go-to lossy codec. Fiddling with those VBR presets for the Lame encoder was and remains the only way to get decent sounding mp3s, without maxing out the codec at 320 kbps. A maxed out bitrate would have been just wasteful on a my tight budget in 2004. I had no money to spend on storage, so I wanted my music collection near-transparent mp3 VBR files with average bitrates around 200 kbps. My equipment was just worse, so I could live with those bitrates. Good headphones used to cost money and portables had pretty modest headphone output quality.
Btw, features like seeking and correct time displays for VBR mp3 was far from perfectly supported at the time. Amazingly, this still remains the case, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why podcasts are almost universally CBR mp3, even when produced or prepared for distribution by people who know what they're doing.
Flash storage was expensive at the time. So, I used CD-RWs with mp3 compatible portable CD players, mostly from Sony. It was risk management on my part - I didn't want a fancy HDD based mp3 player because I couldn't afford to replace it if I ever dropped the damned thing.
And 512 megs of non-replaceable flash storage was just too tight for a vacation, which is what cheap small mp3 players provided. Eventually, mp3 players were good enough though. My last flash based mp3 player before my first smartphone was a Sandisk Sansa Fuze, it supported removable microSDHC, I think, and even the Vorbis and FLAC codecs.
I got into Mac with the late 2008, first pre-pro unibody Macbook, because I worked a service desk gig at the time at the time, and consequently didn't want to even see Windows in my spare time. I also wanted Unix on the desktop, which is a problem Apple still solves, although at a premium.
To be honest, I don't I think I ever would've switched to iPhone due to the missing USB mass storage mode if Spotify hadn't completely taken over my day-to-day music listening. But what pushed me from Androids early was the lack of even security updates on newish flagship phones back in 2011. I considered iOS 5 with music through Spotify good enough, and I've never looked back since.
I had a Sony mini disc player at the time the iPod came out. A friend had one so we were comparing, listening to the same track with the same bitrate on the same headphones. The iPod sound quality was notably poor in comparison.
I understand worse is better. It's just that every so often it gets me down.
I bought an iPhone 8 Plus after using mostly Android phones due to a lot of really good praise from my friends.
I'm finding that while the iPhone's hardware beats most of what Android has to offer, a lot of iOS has weird user design choices (hidden search fields, strange menu placement in apps, random antagonistic design choices), that just seem mildly inconvenient at best.
Also iOS 11 had way more bugs than any Android release I've ever used.
The last straw that made me switch to iOS 10 was how much less buggy iOS was than Android at the time. And then I upgraded to iOS 11 and now enjoy the most buggy OS I have ever experienced on any platform, period. Insane UI glitches in the parts of the UI I use the most often (in the Notification Center?really?), frequent random total crashing (which I haven’t seen in any OS—including on the desktop—since the 2000s)...
I actually do not understand how Apple dropped the ball so badly. Someone should not be getting a bonus.
The buggyness hasn’t honestly affected me, but I am disappointed with the performance of iOS 11 on my 6+, specifically in the phone app and calculator.
I get that people have always complained about older phones being slower on later OS releases, but actually the overal, performance of the phone is fine. For some reason there’s a ton of UI lag on loading screens in the phone app and calculator that’s really frustrating. The phone is only a few years old, but feels like my old 3GS. It’s really annoying to have to pause and wait for the UI to become active in two apps I use extensively, and often want to use in a hurry. This is supposed to be a 64bit desktop class CPU. Games load fast and are snappy as hell. How come loading a dial screen is such a massive undertaking? It’s inexplicable.
Maybe the battery slowdown scandal patch, aka iOS 11.3, and/or a battery replacement will help with that. I used to have a 6+ as well and it felt super laggy since iOS 11.
Will be interesting to check with the person who was handed my 6+ when iOS 11.3 and the battery switch program become available.
Apple skims on RAM/GPU when they upgrade screens or come out with something new. Screen updates sell on hype. People can't wait another cycle for better hardware.
My 6 Plus became super slow with iOS 11 and because of the battery scandal i ran the benchmarks but my 3 year old phone essentially benchmarked exactly like a brand new one would.
Had the same problem with my iPhone 6 Plus, the performance was barely tolerable on iOS 11. I think it might be because Apple skimps on RAM so that a few generations down the road it's just not enough anymore.
Upgraded from the 6 Plus to a 7 Plus that i got for cheap from a friend and it is A LOT snappier. The 7 Plus has 3GB of RAM, the CPU is also twice the speed tough, which makes a difference as well.
On the note of hardware, are there any decent non-Apple smartphones that are small like old iPhones? I miss being able to fit my phone into my front pocket.
The iPhone's hardware is great and it has good bones in the OS but Apple has placed too many artificial restrictions on the experience.
To name one current example, both Android and iOS have the concept of a global password manager for third party apps (and the web-browser). Both Google and Apple offer a password manager that hooks into it. But on Android third party password managers can also utilize the system APIs, whereas on iOS they cannot.
Meaning password managers on iOS are stuck with copy/switch/paste/switch/copy/switch/paste for username and password respectively. On Android you get a popup next to the input box, press it, and it is populated.
This is just one current example but if you look at the history of iOS Apple has been doing this forever. NFC locked to Apple Pay was a previous good example.
That’s incorrect. Password managers on iOS are able to use extensions and thus auto-fill. I use 1Password and auto-fill works with many apps, only on the ones that don’t are you stuck with copy & paste.
What I said is absolutely accurate and you seem to know enough to know that.
Before Apple added the current global autofill APIs on iOS, third party password managers could register a Safari extension. Ignoring how poor the user experience of doing it this way was, it also limited autofill to third party apps based around a Safari webview who chose not to opt out of third party extensions (namely only these apps[0] worked). Very few of the top 250 apps were supported and that remains the case to this day.
Apple added global autofill APIs, but as of today those APIs are only available to Apple. This allows Apple to create a password manager which works across Safari, Safari webview (with or without extensions enabled), and even fully native apps.
If an app isn't listed in [0] it will only work with Apple's password manager or copy/paste. Some apps missing include: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Google's app suite (gmail, google maps, etc), Netflix, Spotify, et al.
Calling my post "incorrect" while understanding the difference between the global autofill APIs and Safari extensions is disingenuous and inaccurate.
> What I said is absolutely accurate and you seem to know enough to know that.
Well, no. What you said was; "But on Android third party password managers can also utilize the system APIs, whereas on iOS they cannot.", which isn't 'absolutely accurate' at all. The share sheet uses a system API to inject the username/password combination. Your statement is demonstrably inaccurate. It's not as fluid as Android's approach, granted. To make you statement more accurate, you should add '...the same system APIs.", although, I'm not sure that is actually the case.
> If an app isn't listed in [0] it will only work with Apple's password manager or copy/paste. Some apps missing include: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Google's app suite (gmail, google maps, etc), Netflix, Spotify, et al.
Ironically, that list totally disproves what you are suggesting, and arguably, the bad actors here are Facebook and Google who own most of the titles listed.
> "But on Android third party password managers can also utilize the system APIs, whereas on iOS they cannot.", which isn't 'absolutely accurate' at all.
Yes it is.
The global autofill APIs on Android are available to all apps. The global autofill APIs on iOS are available to Apple.
> Your statement is demonstrably inaccurate.
Only if you intentionally strip out context of the statement and paint it as saying something else entirely. Let's look at that line in-context:
> To name one current example, both Android and iOS have the concept of a global password manager for third party apps (and the web-browser). Both Google and Apple offer a password manager that hooks into it. But on Android third party password managers can also utilize the system APIs, whereas on iOS they cannot.
It is pretty obvious IN CONTEXT which "system APIs" I was referring to since the previous two sentences and the entire thrust of the post is about one specific topic. Pulling apart my post to strip out context, and then attacking the context-less parts is just arguing for arguing's sake.
You aren't even making a point about the issue I raised (restricted system APIs), you're just being pedantic.
> Ironically, that list totally disproves what you are suggesting, and arguably, the bad actors here are Facebook and Google who own most of the titles listed.
They aren't "bad actors" because they choose to use native controls instead of a webview.
> The global autofill APIs on Android are available to all apps. The global autofill APIs on iOS are available to Apple.
Odd, 1Password filling usename and password fields in different apps without using webview must have been a figment of my imagination. Thanks for correcting me on that. /s
> They aren't "bad actors" because they choose to use native controls instead of a webview.
Ironically, Google uses a webview to login to all their apps on iOS.
Before the S8+ I had an iPhone X, after 5 years without iPhones, and I sold it in less than a month because of the software, in a totally different way than Samsung. The iPhone software is very polished, but it has fundamental design flaws, it's like a shiny bike with wonderful colors but the wheels are actually squared.
I have experience of both, having to use IPhone for work. Android phones are infinitely better. I was actually surprised to find so many stupid bugs in IPhone. I'n my imagination they were solid phones for MAC users. Turns out, as they are the only option, they don't exactly focus on quality.
I've been an iPhone user since the 1st generation 8GB model. (Very 1st was 4GB.) The overall quality of software has gone down. I remember the first time an iOS update caused issues in some fairly foundational code. (Involving UIImage.) Before that, I thought Apple's iOS team infallible.
Today, I have moments when I'm just disgusted with Apple, as well as with 3rd party apps on iOS from well funded companies who should be doing better. Though to be fair, most of the time, things do work. It's just that I run into the odd place where...WAT!?
For me is just annoying small issues like when I listen to music and get a notification from another app suddenly the volume doesn't go up as high anymore and stays low until you reboot the phone. Or that when I'm on Bluetooth it will mess with the wifi and you need to disconnect and reconnect to make it work.
I also really dislike (maybe this is just me) that I can't deal with files as files on an iPhone. I can't just move an mp3 or an ebook to the memory, find it via an app and open it. It feels so locked it.
And that comes down to trust. Apple usually and correctly doesn’t trust third party apps with sensitive information. Anytime you enter a password in, you get switched back to the native keyboard.
It is pure ignorance to claim that iPhone is better than Pixel 2 XL. Both phones are great and it comes down to your personal preference --> look & feel of the device, camera, better Google Apps experiences, Android Auto vs. Carplay, tied up with Google or Apple ecosystems etc.
Please stop making such inflammatory statements with no substance.
I downgraded from an iPhone 5s to an Honor 8. Best decision I could have done. My Honor 8 is still as fast and snappy as it was on day 1. It doesn't take that long for iPhones to become sluggish. Been there, experienced that with the 3g and 5s.
I'm curious, what do you think is better in iOS? I use both, and for the most part one really isn't better than the other. But there are a few things I prefer Android over iOS.
I went into a Samsung store to look for a new phone for my partner and I was really surprised how sluggish all their phones felt, even the flagship models. I couldn't tell why it felt that way. Maybe it's the animations, or software bloat. The glass used on them seems to have a high friction, which contributed to the poor feeling. My partner currently uses an ASUS Zenfone 3 which is one of the snappiest phones I've ever used and it's a lower mid-range phone. I ended up buying her another one. ASUS are making some solid phones at the moment. Their ultra-books are nice as well.
PREACH! Went from an S4 (amazing phone) to an S7 (mediocre at best) to a Pixel and it's going to be Google all the way for me until they find a way to muck it up, too.
On the Pixel it has a singular context aware volume control that doesn't work very well. I've loaded YouTube, pressed volume up/down, and had my ringer volume change more times than I can count.
Even on iOS which has a similar context aware volume control the experience is superior since you can also change the volume from the dock and disable the setting titled "[Ringer] Change with buttons" so it doesn't do anything until media is in focus.
I rarely need to change my ringer volume, I just need a quickly accessible way of going into "Do Not Disturb"/Silence mode for the cinema and meetings. Samsung even offers that from the power menu which is super convenient.
Specifically the youtube experience you describe is a problem in the youtube app itself, not in base Android. Youtube for some contrived reason decided to make it so that Youtube doesn't advertise itself as an audio player until its playing audio. Whenever you aren't playing a video it doesn't show up as a media controller so the system won't have the volume keys change the media volume.
It used to always advertise being a media player so any time the app was active the volume buttons default changed the media volume. They just broke it intentionally.
I use NewPipe[1] for that. It has background and popout modes, including a queue for the background mode, and an option to speed up the video which is perfect for lining up a couple of lectures and listening to them as if they were podcasts.
When I first subscribed to Google Play Music, in the UK, it included "YouTube Music Key", which had the same feature to allow YouTube videos to play in the background, and it worked just fine in the UK.
Then they rebranded YouTube Music Key to YouTube Red, and since YouTube Red isn't available in the UK for legal reasons unrelated to backgrounding YouTube videos, they disabled the backgrounding feature in the UK, even though UK subscribers are still paying for a YouTube Red subscription (that cannot be used in the UK).
With the new-ish priority mode and "do not disturb" modes, I change my ringer volume about as often as I change my "alarm" volume (which is almost never).
I only ever change my media volume, and thanks to apps like that one it can become the default.
If you just want the volume buttons to always control media volume, there's an app for that. 'Rocker Locker' is frequently recommended. Samsung SoundAssistant can also enable this behavior, among other things.
Rocker Locker drains battery since it has to be persistent. Samsung SoundAssistant is only available on Galaxy devices, it isn't compatible with the Pixel.
There's an option for that in the settings. Not entirely sure it's in AOSP, not just LineageOS, but ISTR last time it came up it wasn't just custom ROM users who could find it.
On my phone it's under Settings -> Buttons -> Volume buttons -> Control ringtone volume.
Cyanogenmod supported a lot of phones. LineageOS seems to have a lot of trouble supporting any recent phones (and a surprising amount of trouble letting users know what is and isn't supported, in case they were interested in getting a compatible phone).
I spent a while some time ago trying to watch for any modern phone to get full LineageOS support, and eventually just gave up. The closest things came was "partial support for the Galaxy S8, but it will ruin the camera". How much of a future is there here?
> I bought an S8 with the intention of putting LineageOS on it. Sadly to this day there are things not working which are essential, like making calls or using LTE data... or wifi.. or the camera.
(Just to be clear, the Pixel is losing this comparison... it isn't supported at all. But the fact that the Pixel is losing doesn't mean we can say Samsung is winning... this looks more like a loss for everyone.)
I have an S5 (international) that I am thinking of going through the LOS upgrade. It seems super onerous process; worth it? Live in China using another badly restrained S5 (Chinese version).
I tried to build LOS from scratch for the well-understood Nexus 5, following their wiki instructions, so that my CA certificate could be a privileged "system" cert instead of a worthless "user" cert.
Those instructions didn't actually work. Following the only remaining advice LOS has to offer, I went to their IRC channel to ask what was wrong. After waiting more than half a day, I eventually got a response: "no one really talks in here".
>It is the successor to the highly popular custom ROM CyanogenMod, from which it was forked in December 2016 when Cyanogen Inc. announced it was discontinuing development
Oh. My. God. Thank you. Around about the S5/S7 era I stoppped flashing my phone every 5 minutes, but now with my S7 drinking battery fluid every minute of the day I've been wondering where CM had gone.
I'm not sure how that affects my point? Which was that you'll be missing the feature when you use LOS. (Not to mention I don't know how true it is either... the blacklist page was very much in my OS settings.)
I believe that would be possible even if it were not a dialer feature in CM? Also, I did look around for dialers, but a lot of them seem to do "cloud" stuff of some sort, which I definitely don't want. I ended up finding a non-dialer program to do this, but even that was a pain, since most of them that I tried are either missing functionality or buggy in one way or another.
Good luck getting support when your Pixel 2 XL has issues. Google replaced my Nexus 6P with a faulty refurbished device under warranty, and then cold-shouldered me when the refurbished device bricked itself a few weeks later due to an issue that Google Support knew about when they sent me the replacement. I have a friend who had the exact same experience with his own Google device.
Personally, I would rather rip out my own entrails than buy another Google hardware device and expose myself to their garbage customer service.
> The Android notifications are broken in favor of small things that do not allow you to read the message
Strange. When I switched from a Samsung S5 to a Pixel, the feature I missed the most was Samsung's notification badges. Since my work and personal messages came in on difference apps, I could prioritize with just a glance at my home screen. Now I have a long list of notifications to manage.
Other than that, I do love my Pixel. Google updates are the best.
I quite like Samsung UX or even Huawei UX... more than Google default UX... it gives solutions for most of the things that Android barebones lacks...
I thought about getting a Pixel, but luckily I had the opportunity to try it out and didnt convince me.
The camera was nice, but for half the price you could get a Huawei which are pretty awesome hardware wise...
I have had the S8+ for awhile, mostly because I wanted a non Chinese phone (because preinstalled China apps are a nightmare) that works in (read: not 'everything on Google') and out of China (I travel a lot) with a good camera (because I have a kid). It has done the job.
The S9/S9+ seem mostly "meh, more of the same". Slightly better camera, some seeping-out-to-the-masses ML novelties, but basically standard incremental upgrade stuff.
At this point I have had S1 (which I helped launch in the US, even went to Samsung HQ in Korea), S3, S6 and S8+ and they're all fine, if expensive, though the Bixby button is definitely annoying on the S8+. I am open to change I just can't find another brand I trust, HTC is dying and the Chinese ones are all full of shitty spyware and popups.
I definitely have felt that way, but I have the Note 8 now, and for the first time, I feel like Samsung has mostly tried to stay out of my way, software-wise. I do wish I could repurpose the Bixby key to do something else, but other than that, I love it. Waterproof, SD card slot, beautiful display.
I'm impressed by the S9, but the new features aren't compelling enough to me to upgrade, so maybe next year.
Yes!
I stopped after an S6 Edge and the software was shit even then. Ironically I met some Samsung people in London during that time and they casually said "We're good at hardware, we suck at software and support" in a meeting.
Thas was from people working on printers/scanners, but I feel that this very much defines their mobile business as well.
I agree. I was a longtime Nexus user and switched for the S8 as Pixels were in short supply (UK, not sure if that was the same in the US). We still don't have Oreo on EE over here and I am constantly trying to disable the annoying Samsung software. I will be going for a Pixel 3 next time I expect.
...actually they are just destroying the Android experience.
Maybe that is the end game. Make andoid look bad, then turn around with their own OS that you can optionally install on all of their phones. Maybe even other devices. I mean they cant possibly be trying to make people like using their phones.
The difference between your technically-grounded assessment of the phones produced by Samsung and the assessment of more regular folks is staggering.
It'll take a lot more than a few vendor-specific OS tweaks to put non-tech people off.
To be clear, I agree that the OS modifications implemented by Samsung feel like they result in a less performant experience.
Warning: anecdata below!
My girlfriend's family regularly use various tech devices (laptops, phones, tablets) and are technically literate in the use of such devices for consumptive purposes and I'd rate them as relatively technically illiterate in the use of tech for creating anything beyond simple MS Office-type documents.
As a generalisation, they pay zero attention to the tech media (I'd say they are largely unaware of tech media sources), obtain all tech news via mainstream media and are influenced by both mainstream and Facebook advertising which they don't see as advertising but as useful information.
They have strong brand loyalty or, more specifically, they have a definite preference towards brands they believe have served them well in the past.
They all generally opt for Samsung phones. This seems rooted in prior positive experience with earlier-generation Galaxy devices.
They appear not to differentiate between Samsung's Galaxy line and Samsung's other lines of lower-priced smartphone ranges, suggesting a bias for the brand over the hardware/software combo itself. Their choice of phone contract seems based on Samsung and price almost exclusively.
I have seen them switch from technically better to technically worse hardware and still be pleased with their new phone. A new phone is often perceived as better than an old phone purely due to it being newer.
My girlfriend's mother used Sony phones for years predominantly based on her positive experiences with the Sony brand in non-related lines such as TVs.
She switched recently to a Galaxy S8 when her contract was up for renewal. Her decision was based mostly on the preference for Samsung phones in her immediate family. Her only issue with it was the dedicated Bixby button and her issue was not with Bixby itself but with her unsteady hands pressing the button unwantedly. My girlfriend disabled the button and her mother now perceives the phone as the best thing to have ever existed. She bought a wireless charger, again due to her shaky hands being unable to cope with plugging in a charging cable. The positive association with the wireless charger further reinforces her positive opinion of the S8 regardless of the fact that wireless charging exists across many phone brands and ranges.
The bloat of vendor-specific OS modifications is a non-issue. If the bloat factor is consistent, a phone today is faster and better than a phone of two years ago.
They see smartphones grouped into three families: iPhones, Android phones and Samsung phones. That the OS on a Samsung phone is based on Android is not considered. That a phone may not get OS upgrades in a timely manner, or at all, is a complete non-issue for people that don't know that such updates exist, don't generally care about the OS and who replace their phone every two years.
Similar to how many get a Windows upgrade only by buying a new computer (although less-so now with Windows 10 but more so historically), many get an Android OS upgrade only when getting a new phone. That a phone should get, or needs to have, OS upgrades is also a complete non-issue.
In short, for those not close to the tech industry, there is nothing wrong with Samsung phones. The common gripes we in the tech field often mention (slow/lacking updates, under-performant UI tweaks aka lack of purity) are so much of a non-issue for the majority of Samsung phone users to make effectively zero difference to Samsung.
There is an app that captures the moment the Bixby app is launched and replaces it with an action... So totally an hack because Samsung refused to provide a sane way to repurpose the button. Sometimes you can see Bixby launching and then being closed immediately.
The lack of notification numbers/icons on Andoid still bugs me though and Samsung does add those. Windows Phones even have/had numbers on their tiles. iOS has them also. The third party versions don't work on Andoid Oreo currently.
Edit: Oreo notifications dots clear all notifications when you open the application which is rather useless imo. Also still doesn't display a number. https://android.stackexchange.com/q/191401
Sounds like it is a matter of preferences though, they could disappear and I would not even notice : I read most of my notifications from the locker screen or notification shade anyway
No. I am running Oreo. They do not work like iOS and Windows Phones. It dismisses all notification for that application when you open that app. Not to even mention there is no number.
I can really recommend getting a Sony Xperia, especially the XZ1 which I just recently bought for myself. It has an SD card slot, a 3.5mm jack, it runs Android Oreo with very little bloat and feels like stock Android. The camera is great and can do the exact same super slow mo as samsung is advertising with the S9. The fingerprint sensor and lock button are the same and perfectly placed at the side of the phone. The battery life is also really great, now when my phone is new it lasts me almost 2 days with normal use. And relatively cheap for being a flagship. It's hard to understand why Sony phones get constantly overlooked.
I would not doubt that Google has paid to manipulate social media to promote its phones. I wouldn't doubt Samsung does either. But just remember that as you read that comments.
Small question: Do people still buy $800 phones, and why? If you care about security, these probably won't receive security upgrades for more than a few years (S3 went from ICS to Kitkat. S4 went from Jelly-Bean to Lollipop, S5 went from KitKat to Marshmallow, S6 went from Lollipop to Nougat, so I don't expect this to make it past Android Q[1] (which should come out in two and a half years)), and unlike older models, custom ROM support is quite bad for modern Samsung models (S6 Lineageos just came out. S8 isn't supported yet).
Wouldn't it make more sense to get a slightly worse quality phone, but upgrade it every two years or so?
[1]. Unless Treble will make it so much easier to port to S9.
There must be a term for this kind of question. To answer it, yes. Look at Apple’s average selling price and people are buying maxed out iPhone 8s and X’s.
But that question is like the old internet trope - “I haven’t had a television in 10 years. Do people still watch TV?”
That comment was regarding the expected lifetime of a device.
Apple is known for supporting their hardware for a looong time. You can for example, upgrade a 5S (2013) to iOS11. That 8/X people are buying can be expected to be fully usable through 2023, whereas for Android that's ~2 years.
Apple just announced discontinuing support for the original AppleTV that they first sold in 2007 so yeah Apple is pretty good with support most of the time.
You can still download older versions of apps from the App Store for iOS back to 4. I recently reset an old first gen iPad and was able to use older versions of Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Spotify, Plex and the entire iWork suits.
I usually buy a $900 iPhone, sell it for $600 after a year, and buy the new iPhone for $900. So I spend around $300 to upgrade my iPhone every year.
I used to upgrade my phone after 3 years, at that point the phone becomes very outdated and it's worth is hardly $100. So it costs me around the same if I buy an inexpensive phone every year, buy an expensive phone and use it for few years, or trade up a new iPhone every year.
depends when you buy... I sold my last phone for the same amount that I bought it for, a year later (bought it on sale and it was not a Pixel or iPhone)
Samsung Galaxy J3... not a flagship phone, but I bought it and sold it for around $50 ... another example could be the LG X-charge that was sold by Comcast for $0.01 last year on sale (no contract) and it is $180 now
Anecdote: It takes less than 10 minutes. I call the local iPhone/Mac dealer, we agree on a time, they come, give me money, I give them the device and it's done.
I bought a pixel 2 (for $650), and I would have bought a pixel xl if it weren't for the inferior screen.
something to consider: if I had had a 32GB og pixel at the launch of the pixel 2, I could have sold it for ~$400. if that trend continues, I would be happy to pay about $250 a year to always have a current flagship phone with monthly security updates. that's only 20% more expensive than just buying a ~$400 phone (nexus 5x launch price) every two years. of course you could also sell the cheaper phone, but the non-google phones seem to lose their value faster.
the real question is, why spend flagship money on anything other than a pixel?
Sort of. LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1) was officially released yesterday. Mi5, Mi5s and Mi5s plus were among the initial batch of about a dozen supported devices.
>I would be happy to pay about $250 a year to always have a current flagship
I find this rent-like model very strange. It was the same problem with carrier contracts. Now that contracts, at least in their original form, are gone, not much has changed. Due to a variety of reasons, people still end up paying the same or more than before.
I'm not saying I literally want to rent a phone for $250 a year. I still desire all the benefits of owning the phone, like selling it for market value at a time of my choosing, being able to switch carriers without paying off the phone first, etc. I'm saying that $250 doesn't seem like an unreasonable annual spend to have a current generation phone with timely OS/security updates. it definitely sounds better than buying a $400-500 phone whose OS is already out of date at launch every two years and then not bothering to sell it because it has depreciated so much.
the only thing that makes it rent-like is that I would pay a similar price every year.
The new Nokia 7 Plus appears to be a good choice for a mid range at €390. Runs Android One so no crapwares. Snapdragon 660, 4G ram, 18:9 screen, quick charging, 3.5mm jack, NFC.
Anecdotally, the kind of person who spends 800 - 1000 on a phone also upgrades it every year or two. It's a status symbol as much as anything. Plus there's always the fact that you will have the latest and greatest camera, and for many people that's important.
Personally, I'm with you. Recently bought a Moto G5 plus for a couple of hundred euro and its fine. However, I do confess if I had a higher income I'd probably be another happy consumer of the super high end phones.
Worth noting that in Europe at least they have a very high resale value, so you will make much of the cost back if selling in a year or so in good condition.
No idea what a general profile of such people is, but I generally buy my wife a new top model every 3-4 years. She couldn't care less about status and neither do I, who inherits them afterwards :) This way the phone is used for 5+ years and makes lost initial "saving" meaningless.
I had cheaper phones before but saving a couple hundred euros in exchange for a couple of years of annoyance is not worth it to me. This way I know she gets currently top experience and I, when I get her phone, get a very well understood one.
On the high end phones, there's usually a pretty good resale value. So even though the phone might cost $800, in two years it's probably still going to be worth $300.
In the next week or two I am upgrading my phone and I think I'm going to buy my first iPhone. The only other phone I would consider is one from Google. Because they do such a crappy job with security, I'll never again consider an LG, Samsung, or other third party phone. Apple or Google for me.
Moto G5+ is an awesome budget phone (especially the version with more memory). 90% as good as the flagships for less than half the cost. Also, I quite like Motorola's version of Android. Very minimal with a few very useful features. The double chop motion for the flashlight is ingenious.
Caveat: If you care about a lot about the best possible photo quality, then it probably isn't the right choice. I found it to be good enough for my needs.
"the kind of person who spends 800 - 1000 on a phone also upgrades it every year or two"
Nope, I don't mind how much my phone costs since I use it daily, but I will use it until some component fails in a terminal way. I had a Note 3, swapped its display module once, but it finally died. It lasted maybe three or four years.
> but I will use it until some component fails in a terminal way
This is what I told myself too, but I also upgraded after 3-4 years after being annoyed at just how slow my phone was (or to put it another way, just how much CPU power apps demanded now). The phone still works perfectly fine, it just slows down to a crawl right when you're in the biggest hurry. (e.g. at one point Google Maps took multiple minutes to refresh the screen right when I was driving and trying to figure out the right directions, and I still haven't been able to reproduce it, but I sure as heck don't want to live through that experience again.)
With the iPhone having 40-50% market share in the US, I doubt anyone sees it as a status symbol. Besides, every major carrier has some sort of monthly lease or 0% interest plan. It’s not that hard to get an $800 phone affordability.
I'd say in Europe people try to resell them for high price (looking at eBay DE), but given so many of them are there stuck at the same price for months, I don't think their resale value is actually that high.
I but a top of the line iPhone every year. I get a tax discount of half of it because I use it for development, then I sell it at the next year and make the rest back.
Most people don't buy $800 phone, they pay $30+/mo for two years until it is paid off or they trade it in for something newer and continue paying $30+/mo.
$30/mo is comparable to $20/mo for most people, and they get the newest shiniest thing (and non-tech people don't know that Android phones don't get updates after the new model comes out).
It would unless of course you buy brand where that is less of a problem either because they are supported longer (iPhones) or because you can install something like LineageOS.
I would like to find a carrier that does actually push updates. But this was a specifically branded Samsung update. 6 months after they should have
Carriers should not be responsible or even allowed to push updates outside of very limited reasons. Samsung made the phone they should be legally required to actively update it
Buying it for a full price isn't the best idea, but it seems like T-mobile US likes to do a "buy one get one free" deal on those about 6 months after the release (that's how I did it last year with S8+). No contract either, the phone will just be locked to t-mobile until you pay the whole price, which you can do over 24 months (no extra charges) with the option to pay the whole thing off at any moment.
> Samsung Electronics is to slash production at its OLED panel plant in response to customer Apple's decision to reduce output of the iPhone X following weak demand
None of the words in your quote are sourced by Apple, they are entirely based on rumors in the supply chain.
Trying to read the tea leaves on what supplier changes mean for the overall market is a waste of your time. It’s about as far from unequivocal as I can imagine.
Forget about Treble, OEMs are the ones expected to deliver updates and they don't even have to certify their phones for Oreo, if they are initially released with an earlier version.
Hence why the majority of new 2018 devices thus far are all coming with Nougat.
Usually Samsung has a lot of deals so you end up getting a BOGO offer or some trade in offer so most people don't end up paying 800 bucks for it. I think I paid like half of that.
I generally buy $600 phones, but I spend a fraction of that buying used/refurb (eBay,etc.). I have an S7 Edge+, S7 Edge, 2 S7s, an S6, and an S6 edge. I spent maybe $1400 on all combined, with all but the S7E+ being in essentially new condition (it's cracked and ugly but makes a good, free WiFi server).
I need a phone that does everything. Water proof, wireless fast charging, vr, use it as a credit card everywhere. Slow software updates are something I knew going into it. Oh and a headphone jack. I try to find phones that do everything my s8 does but I can’t.
Oh FFS. I don't need a fancier camera. I don't need animated emojis. I need a battery that lasts all day without having to keep the phone in low-power mode all the time. And I want it removable so when it wears out I can replace it myself. Samsung is jumping the shark.
Batteries of the same capacity can have different quality/lifetimes. Batteries in phones that get hotter also don't live as long. Batteries in Chinese phones that constantly do obscure stuff in the background also don't tend to last a full day.
If you don't mind having a bit bulkier phone, I can highly recommend getting one from the Moto Z family + a battery moto mod.
I have a Play Z 1st gen and together with the mod, the battery lasts 4-5 days. It's pretty affordable, and while it's pretty bulky that is easily outweighed by not having to worry about running out of power anymore.
FWIW I'm very happy with my new Moto Z series phone so far. I haven't sprung for any mods yet but the phone itself is good. Battery life isn't great without the battery moto mod, but seems typical. For $350 unlocked I'll take this any day over an $800 phone.
One of the last updates for the Moto Z Play 1 did something horrible to my battery life and now it's no better than your average phone. If you check reddit and the Motorola support forum there are tons of people with the same problem.
I absolutely loved my Sony Z3 Compact exactly for that reason. Was happy to sacrifice fullHD screen for an all-day phone that was still fully functional. I was really disappointed to discover that, when it was time to upgrade, that line had been discontinued.
Shame it wasn't available last year when I bought my current phone. Last year there really wasn't anything truly worthy to be called a successor to the Z3 compact.
Actually, I think the camera & battery life are currently the most important features on a smartphone. I take all my pictures with my S8, casual or vacation and I'm thrilled if the next models are coming with a even better camera.
Battery wise, I think that by now the minimal accepted performance is a full day on a single charge, with normal use, 4G and Wifi. Upgraded to the Samsung flagship every 2 years in the past 8 years and battery life was always within this acceptable limits.
I can understand that Samsung's target market doesn't consist of users who may install Lineage or other ROMs, but what's their motivation for selling a phone with a locked bootloader? Samsung sells excellent hardware, and as an S8 owner I've found their version of Android is acceptable. But why not allow users to unlock the bootloader: what's the risk to Samsung by allowing this?
I have a friend who googled for "How to update phone to KitKat", found a website that walked him through installing an unofficial build on his phone, and he promptly messed it up and broke his phone.
Took it back to the phone shop, complained that is was broken, was given a replacement.
The question is, is the gains from users like you or I worth the loss from those types of users, either from refusing them and upsetting them, or helping them and paying for fixes?
Alternatively they could make it dead-easy to recover from such situations. IMHO the MediaTek platforms have excelled at this --- all you need to do is find the right software (the harder part for unbranded/generic devices, but Samsung could certainly provide downloads) and you can do a reflash, even if the internal storage is completely wiped. It's the same process they use to put the original software on them at the factory.
The MTK SoCs have an embedded boot ROM which is really read-only and can't be modified, short of physical damage; and it has enough code to act as a USB device that their flashtool can communicate with. It boots into this "download" mode if it can't find a valid partition on the eMMC or the power button is held down while being plugged into USB.
It makes me wonder how the other popular smartphone SoC platforms handle this "initial format/install", because the internal storage is certainly going to have nothing on it, not even a bootloader, when first manufactured.
I think they all do something similar, either via JTAG or USB. The problem is the drivers, software and ROM needed to flash the device are very confidential.
My experience with the mediatek flashing software on Windows was that it looked like one of those hacker tools that generates a license key for Photoshop while installing a trojan.
If you're referring to SPflashTool, it certainly has a very different appearance but keep in mind that it was originally a factory tool, so the programmers didn't spend much time making it "pretty" --- there's source code floating around that you can inspect and compile yourself if you're that worried.
from what i've read it's not Samsung but the carriers that require it to be locked. outside the states you can get an unlockable bootloader on both Snapdragon and Exynos variants.
it pisses me off because my wife purchased a Sprint flavor S8 (full price, no contract) because its radios are better for Sprint's bands but i cannot unlock it to install Lineage or TWRP >:(
EDIT: i might be wrong, all Snapdragon variants are locked. the best that's been achieved is root with a bunch of caveats:
Carriers don't seem to have an issue with any of Google's phones being unlocked, I don't see why they would only require it on other manufacturers. They might prefer locked bootloaders, but Samsung has enough sales volume that I imagine they could do whatever they wanted.
Carriers don't tend to sell Google's phone. Verizon seems to be the only carrier selling Google's Pixel, and they have a locked bootloader on that version.
I think it's crazy to believe that Samsung of all companies can't stand up to Verizon. Every time I hear a company say "we have to do this because carriers demand it", unless that company is Essential or some small time player, I literally do not believe it. Verizon isn't going to be the only company that doesn't stock the latest Samsung phone, like they're not going to be the only company who doesn't stock the iPhone. Android fans would go nuts and would leave Verizon before they left their Samsung.
I don't believe Verizon is to blame for one second. They may be a convenient scapegoat, but Verizon would lose over Samsung if they started a boycott against each other.
You’re right, Verizon wouldn’t be the only company not stocking the S9 because the boot loader is unlocked. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint would join them. ALL the carriers have their pennies-per-user gains to be made with their unremovable crapware, and I’m quite sure they are all completely over the customer support drain from Android malware.
I find this argument hard to believe. google, htc, lg, and motorola all sell phones with unlockable bootloaders. the pixel 2 is locked if you buy from verizon, but you can easily get the unlockable one direct from google and use it on any carrier.
I could believe that carriers require a locked version to sell in their own stores, but I can't believe samsung is uniquely unable to sell phones with unlockable bootloaders.
Nice device, horrible software. If Samsung did another Google Play edition like they did with the S3, I'd buy one.
I've been looking for an upgrade to my current Android phone for a little minute. I just want vanilla Android and an aesthetic device. I don't care about the camera, bigsby, or face/touch unlock.
The Pixel 2 feels great, with it's super stock Android, but it's design is very lackluster. If I am spending a thousand dollars (Australia), then I don't want to make any compromises.
As a consumer, I'm feeling let down by the selection of phones. Honestly, the iPhone has never looked better to me.
I was in this very boat recently. My LG backup phone got bricked by an OTA. So I was left with a flip phone while waiting.
My requirements were less than 300, stock android realistically two years out of the device. 4.5" to 5", smaller preferable, and a headphone jack. There was almost nothing like this.
I ended up on the google pixel. However, it was difficult as I kept getting Verizon bootloader locked revisions. Despite them being listed as international or gsm unlocked. I finally found one in my upper bracket at 450, 128GB version. Its official support ends in October of this year. I've also read about a ton of hardware issues so I'm hopeful it'll hold out.
Android phones are to me a shit show, to put it mildly. They're good, but not long term. I'm also leary of buying higher ended phones. I've had far to many times where my phone was knocked out of my hand at a bus stop. Then broken screen.
The closest I've seen right now is oneplus or get a last gen pixel.
I highly recommend the Xiaomi Mi A1[1]. It is part of the Android One[2] program so it vanilla Android and will receive all updates directly from Google. I recently ordered one a few weeks ago and it has been phenomenal, especially the battery life! The only thing I miss from my old phone that this doesn't have is NFC (i.e., Android Pay won't work) but other than that, it checks off a lot of boxes for a solid smartphone!
I don't know if you've used recent Samsung phones (last 2 years). The software is much better than in any android phone. No slowdown, jam packed with features, close to zero fluff. I agree that animations can jerk around a bit sometimes, but that is a minor issue that they seem to be improving with every update.
Does it have a removable battery? MicroSD? How about the CPU, RAM, and other specs? That's what power users want to know, and it's conspicuously missing from that page (the word "battery" doesn't even appear, not even once!)
The web page is poorly designed, the usual chunky and spaced out "bigger is better" look. The navigation menu at the top is not anchor links for that page, but goes to other pages where you can find details like microSD card etc.
Interesting, if there is one thing I hope Apple takes away from this, it is the adjustable aperture. But time will tell whether a moving part will last long on a smartphone.
Though I fear that, like with Google's dual CMOS, they are too committed to the multiple cameras and removing one may come off as a downgrade to consumers whether or not a single one can satisfy all the same functions.
One thing I'm not understanding here; don't most lenses (and by extension cameras) have adjustable apertures? What is so special about having a F1.4 vs. F2.4 apertures available to the camera? Is it because they can both fire at the same time and compose the two exposures?
Most camera lenses do, and generally give a wide range of stops, often down to f22. Phones have, until now, fixed aperture, fixed lenses.
Given how tiny phone camera lenses are I'm surprised to see variable, given how little range you get from two fixed stops. Course it may be the first move towards having a proper range of f stops, which can only be a good thing.
At the expense of a moving part, having the option to close down the aperture will probably improve image quality in daylight. With a fixed aperture, increased low light sensitivity usually brings lower resolution (so called "fast" lenses generally have improved optical characteristics with their aperture stopped down).
That is unless these dinky sensors are diffraction limited at f/1.5, which I doubt.
Most if not all smartphones have a fixed aperture. A lower F-stop allows more light to enter through the lens. This is advantageous in low light but during the day it may cause pictures to wash out. Because ISO can only go so high before minor hand movement seriously blurs a photo, it is better to have a larger aperture, again for low-light conditions. So a single adjustable lens over a single sensor can allow for a variety of ideal combinations depending on the conditions.
I assumed they want to use two sensors as a means of reading depth for their special camera filters, and being able to make one a wide-angle and the other magnified is an added benefit.
It's neat to see all the creative takes on cameras, though. Google seems to have proven that you can get good results mimicking depth using one sensor, but I'm sure there are still benefits to be found with two.
The s8 is slippery as hell and very fragile. My screen cracked after just a month. Replacement is crazy expensive.
Unless s9 changes that, don't buy it!
Yeah the s8 is insanely slippery. I put a concrete dbrand on the back of mine just so I could pull it out of my pocket and not toss it half way across the room. I'll never understand the all glass trend.
I think Samsung and other manufacturers can't win there. People complained about the perceived build quality when their flagships had a plastic body. Unless you use harder and thicker polycarbonate (like the Lumias or the iPhone 5c) it's hard to have something that truly lasts. You're left with aluminum, which brings tons of problems (it's easy to bend, scratch, the anodization will fade, it feels cold and it's also slippery, and you need to make way for antennas), or glass.
Repacking the display is near impossible because there’s no frame around the display and everything is glued which means trying to open you nearly invariably break the screen.
Unfortunately comes with Samsung's crapware that cannot be removed, and even a non remappable button to trigger it. I will be patiently waiting for an exploit to be found in the bootloader so we can reflash this with a ROM without Samsung anything. At that point in time, it will probably be a good contender for second best Android phone. After the pixel
You'll be waiting for a while; I bought an S8 with the intention of putting LineageOS on it. Sadly to this day there are things not working which are essential, like making calls or using LTE data... or wifi.. or the camera.
I thought I could deal with the Samsung crapware anyway, coming from iPhone and having used a OnePlus One with Cyanogen and later lineage... Boy, I was wrong, beautiful hardware for sure but the OS is utter garbage.
By garbage I mean: Bixby is unwanted and disabled, but it still pops up nearly constantly.. essential features of the phone require a samsung account, in an attempt not to sign up for it I get notified weekly that I must have one.. samsung programs will randomly notify me about random things that I have no interest in knowing about. Especially samsung pay- I DO NOT WANT AN OFFER ON COFFEE JUST LET ME USE YOU TO BUY THINGS. Upday has a pre-loaded list of the worst british newspapers, and insists on telling me about "breaking news" regarding a nice young american lady who is marrying one of our princes...
I miss my phone being in my control, and that's what everyone who was selling me on android was telling me was compelling about the platform.. But I had much more control of my phone when I was with Apple.
(And yes, I donated heavily to the LineageOS+S8 effort)
Luckily since this phone ships with Android Oreo, it is required to comply with project treble, which makes this a whole lot easier. By definition, a phone with project treble has to boot and pass all tests in the Android compatibility test Suite with an unmodified AOSP image.
You can already see some benefits of this on the XDA website, where some people are successfully replacing system images on no name phones with barely any audience and not even a kernel source published
That's excellent, I'm quite sour now I don't think I'll be dropping 800eur on this, maybe the generation after once I see other people reaping these benefits.
Bixby has never popped up since I disabled it. Even a long hold on the bixby button doesn't do anything, so I'm not sure how you get it to pop up frequently.
I had to look up what Upday is. It's not installed on my S8, although I could download it from the play store. If you don't like it just uninstall it.
Samsung Pay isn't available in Norway, so I don't have it on my phone either. So I guess you could always disable it.
And the Samsung account... Well, it's the same as a Google account. The system is going to complain if you don't have one. Otherwise disable all the Samsung stuff.
> so I'm not sure how you get it to pop up frequently.
Sincerely: Accidentally swiping left on the home-screen. Happens a lot, sometimes it'll just open it without me swiping left while unlocking the screen...
This is just misinformation. Since the September update, there is a way to completely disable the assistant button functionality without using any third party apps.
Having been with Samsung since the S3, my current S7 will be my last. It is THE most fragile phone I have ever owned - replaced 3x already, at $150/pop even with the insurance. I've never had to get a case for any other Samsung before, but this is unacceptable. My next phone will be a Purism.
That's because the S2 and S3 were made from impact-absorbing plastic, which is a perfectly good material if it weren't for the designers and Apple's screaming about "premium materials" (i.e. breakable glass and rigid metal that transmits the impact force.)
Perhaps people need to get used to the fact that a "plasticky" phone which creaks and bends slightly, is also one that is far less likely to shatter if dropped. That flexibility absorbs and dissipates the impact force, which is the reason why plenty of other handheld devices (remote controls, etc.) are made of it instead of metal and glass.
"Bezel-less" screens make no sense to me either --- besides protecting the display itself from impacts, they are places fingers can be put to hold onto the phone without activating the touchscreen.
I have an S6 edge, which has been surprisingly sturdy, much probably because the metallic chassis juts out slightly above the glass in all corners, and it appears to provide a quite reasonable protection. A custom home screen app / loader fixes the most atrocious software issues, and the device is well balance and nicely sized. But yeah, they really should try stop fixing Android by adding crap software and crazy home screen junk.
But, then they made the S7, which looks like if it had somehow accidentally swollen after the design was done. Quite literally as if someone simply increased the thickness of all the interior parts, and thought: -Should we bother to fix the outer bezel so it looks reasonable, and protects this amazing screen masquerading as a phone? Naaah, I'm already late for lunch.
And then the S8. I guess ot went something like this. Hey, look, Apple made a phone without any tactile features whatsoever, it's super easy to drop, and the biggest versions even bends if you sit down with it in your pocket, we must do something similar!!
We have this infinity screen trademark, so lets make a painted bezel that doesn't protect the sceen at all, with no tactile feedback, and oh, did I mention the bezel is painted? It's a premium feature, because of the lack of a clearly visible border, we can make it so the screen will look banged up even before the screen has actually become damage!!
I had some hopes for the S9, that they might have realized that only Apple can make super slippery phones with dubious usability and have everyone rave about how amazing they were. Apparently, they either haven't figured ot out, or we actually now have two phone producers that can sell expensive everyday tools that appear to be made to break.
Last I checked, the wait on Purism could be a long time. As far as cases go - why are you so against them? I put on a case and a screen protector on every phone I get. Obviously it hides the aesthetics, but it's just practical to have one. I just stopped worrying about dropping my phone and all.
Of all the things you would want to make a "me too" product out of, the iPhone X sure isn't one I would pick. It's sad that AR emojis and face recognition made the key new features list. Those two sounded like a gimmick when they were announced, and after actually using the iPhone X I can't say my opinion has changed.
The sooner Samsung either steps up their software game or quits it altogether, the better off their users will be.
It is admittedly very much like TouchID version 1 i.e. it will need several revisions to be perfect. But you can really see why Apple went with it.
Because when your phone authenticates e.g. banking app without you even realising it you then appreciate that it is a better solution than a fingerprint reader.
The last 20 years have taught us to be super vigilant, but that is because the bad guys were (are) always at our heels (if not occasionally pulling ahead), but surely the gold standard for security is that which is just there and works, but which you never have to see or think about.
Of course, actions should only be taken when actually asked for, but a banking app that will show you (and only you) your balance without a separate authentication step seems like a great thing. It can also add security to other apps that might perhaps be slightly under-protected due to the current hurdle of clearing auth: perhaps your messaging apps will only show the content of messages when it's you looking?
They seem to be using real photos from their new low light camera which is commendable. Its unfortunate that their low light photos still look like crap.
This would be very nice. IFF they just allowed me to throw out their bloated software, put Lineage on the thing and still be able to use any of the non-standard hardware features.
Frankly, the "biometrics" stuff in these phones is such an anti-feature IMHO...
Not a samsung user but I would definitely like to have variable aperture and 960fps slow motion. The latter can enable uses that smartphones could not previously have.
Same as Sony XZ premium, it is capable of shooting for 0.2s in that speed. Amazing speed and crippling duration. Camera memory size is limited to this and nothing could be done. More of marketing trick and really hardly useful thing.
Wow, the camera is f1.5 and the results look very nice. Blurring the background is neat and the results look good. Not perfect (check out the wisps of hair on the model disappear) but its so much better than the average photo i see shared on facebook. Bokeh filters are a bit of fun, but i can't imagine anyone i know will notice them or care about them.
I was hoping to hear something about the imminent Gear watch (S4?). I guess Apple is the only company that bundles their various releases into a single event?
How did Samsung it was a good idea to round the glass edges of a screen to the point that it warps displays colour & creates glare from indirect light?
It looks to be as big of a problem as on their 8 which I’ve observed people experience frustration with.
Sorry, but even though I don't like Samsung phones, I really despise this kind of comment. Imagine if someone said "we don't need more smart phones, iPhones ready beautifully fill the smartphone market". How shirt sighted do you have to be to turn your nose up at the very idea of competition in a market? Even if you stick with the original product in a particular market, competition almost always makes the original product better by keeping the creator on its toes.
I'm not a huge fan of this new Samsung release. But it's not because there's already phones in the market. Adding another phone to a particular market is a positive, not a negative.
Build quality wise, iPhone is on top and samsung is the closest.
What I mean is the form factor (thickness and bezels) and the material feel. These points really matter when using a phone. Phones are pretty much there performance wise, now what matters is 'the experience'. That is screen quality, and handling.
Pixel doesn't fill the market with anything. It's just a mediocre phone priced exorbitantly. If pixel were the only option in the high end android market, there wouldn't be a market for high end android phones anymore.
