Hold on tight, we are almost back…
Previously on Lemmy: Sony
Past Discussions:
I thought we should restart the brand discussion with something more popular to give this community relaunch a bit more oomph. So, Samsung it is.
I’ve never really used a Samsung phone much before, despite them being so popular in the States. Have friends who used them, they usually look nice and high quality, and the Galaxy S Active are the only high-end phones I know that doesn’t shatter when you look at them wrong without a case, so, props to Samsung.
There are may reasons I don’t like Samsung phones: Hardware fuse disabling Knox on bootloader unlock, Exynos vs Snapdragon models, the mandatory Bixby button, the Galaxy Note 7 that really blew up. To me, Samsung phones are trying so hard to go against what makes Android good, which is the customizability to do whatever you wanted. Android is everything; Samsung is just Samsung.
Personally, I think Samsung is only worth buying at the very high end for the Galaxy S series. I’ve heard that A series have gotten better, but there always seems to be better choices from Moto/Pixel/Chinese brands on Amazon that it’s not worth considering their low tier offering.
What should we do next week? I’m thinking Microsoft, just to make fun of them for the very idea of making a Surface Duo 2.
FAQ:
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Hardware great, software garbage. They really want to be like Apple but aren’t even half as competent (which is more an insult to Samsung than praise to Apple). It comes bloated with all kind of garbage alot of which you can’t uninstall (like Facebook). They have their own app store next to the Google Store which is annoying. It has no reason to be there other than distributing their shitty apps that I don’t want in the first place.
I currently have an S21 and can’t wait to have the spare income to replace it.
Facebook does not come on their unlocked phones. I’ve set up my S8 and S23, as well as Note 9 and Note 22 for family and none of them came with bloatware aside from Samsung’s apps. However I got a used Galaxy tablet on AT&T and it had so much crap on it. At least it’s removable using ADB.
It does however include meta services, meta app manager, and meta app installer which you have to either disable after enabling view of system apps or use adb to remove it.
Fun fact, the Meta installer is a system app so it can quietly install (also system) stuff without your knowledge.
Also, having seen what extensive spying a regular Facebook app does (when it’s a non-system app!) I wouldn’t touch a Samsung phone without root with a ten foot pole.
Bold of them to assume people who buy expensive Android phones still use Facebook in 2023.
I bought a Samsung phone years ago and had to return it. I remember feeling really conflicted when I decided to return it. Hardware wise it was the best there was at the time and the phone itself looked beautiful. On paper it was a monster. Yet it dropped frames like crazy and stuttered doing the most basic tasks. I just couldn’t justify spending that much money for a mediocre experience. Such a pity.
It’s okay. Not bad, not great. Gonna get a Google phone with a headphone jack on it. Don’t really need my phone for anything other than basic tasks.
Samsung has great hardware but my OG galaxy S2 was peak Samsung for me. I still love their build quality but I don’t like curved screens, lack of sd slots and 3.5mm jack and so on. Neither do I want all the Samsung social etc. apps.
If Samsung made a clean phone like the pixel with their build quality, that would be a game changer.
It would be interesting for the users but it would also undermine Samsung’s position in their war with Google.
The reason Samsung duplicates all the apps etc. is so that they keep Google at arm’s length. Google controls their manufacturers with tightly controlled deals for the Android trademark and access to the Play Store and Services Framework. By duplicating those and the app ecosystem, Samsung is saying “we won’t be so easy to get rid of”.
Granted, Samsung is also the largest Android manufacturer, so all out war would probably mean the fracture of the entire Android landscape.
I’ve once read a comparison between the income percentage that Android represents for Samsung and Google respectively and I seem to recall it would damage Google more than Samsung. But it was years ago so that might have changed, and also the Google side analysis involved guesswork about the impact on their ad and data collection business.
I don’t mind the phone/contacts/dialer etc. They seem pretty functional most of the time. I hate my phone being loaded with AR Emoji, Samsung sync and a bunch of other stuff that should either be opt in or allowed to be uninstalled.
What pisses me off even more is that despite all this junk, they can’t be arsed to develop a proper audio player or Equalizer.
Whatever their position is, I paid more than a reasonable amount of money for this phone and I should be able to use it how I want to. I appreciate the fact that I can install graphene or calyxos on my pixel 5a and resign the bootloader while you can’t touch a single thing without tripping Knox on my note 9.
Woah… i learned something new today
That’s the spirit.
Samsung social eh? Maybe they should just make their own Lemmy instance. That’d be pretty cool.
Lol, from my limited amount of reading, Samsung seems to be a company that unduly tries to influence the SK government, much more so that Google/Apple in the US. So I have no clue how this will shape up.
P.S The actual app is called Samsung Members or something.
I don’t have much to add to the conversation, but I watched this video and I thought it was a pretty good summary of the history of Samsung and SK.
Samsung phones have great hardware, but all the Samsung bloatware ruins the phone. Good if you can get one with only stock android
The only good thing about Samsung’s software is Dex which unfortunately has no decent replacement.
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It doesn’t help for wanting to use my phone as a pseudo PC on the TV, though.
Samsung phones are the worst android phones you can buy, except for all the others.
As frustrating as Samsung is, I always find myself going back to them. Displays, build quality, cameras, performance, storage capacity, speakers, software features (Dex!), they’re just ahead of the curve across the board.
The only legitimate advantage of Chinese phones is the super fast charging, but I’m in the better safe than sorry camp on that one.
I’ve had the Fold 3 and now Fold 4, and I really don’t see myself getting anything other than a Fold 6 down the line, unless something major changes.
Those sliding/expandable screen models looked pretty slick. I hope by the time they get to the Fold 6 it’ll just be an expandable stick phone rather than actually folding.
As someone who exclusively used Samsung flagships as their daily driver (GS2 > Note 4 > Note 8 > Note 20 Ultra), I was a Samsung absolutist and fanboy. But their decisions since the N20U has been frustrating, and has had me eyeing other brands for the first time.
To start about what I love about them: fantastic hardware with solid software. I don’t mind their excessive features, because they become so useful, Android/Google adds them to stock 2-3 years later. So it’s like a decent beta test for some awesome utilities, like saying “smile” to take a photo with the camera when you can’t reach the shutter button. I think several phones now offer this.
What has me eyeing something else for my next phone: shitting on their hardcore power users and greedily taking away options. The removal of the SD card (critical for my usage), the dilution of their features across different models (base, plus, ultra), removing the magstripe, etc. are all anti-consumer with NO benefit to their customers. Even if your typical customer doesn’t use a specific feature, it strips the option away from those who do, and it’s not like the savings go towards the consumer. If not for these decisions (among other, smaller infractions), I wouldn’t be contemplating other brands.
I’m going to jump to Samsung’s defense here as I think your anti-consumer belief is misguided:
- the SD card has been drifting away from most Android phones for the core reason of reliability. Data stored on SD cards is not at reliable and when apps are forced to run off the SD card, there are side effects and crashes which are nightmares for devs. When a non brand SD card loses a user’s data, the user blamed the phone manufacturer, which is akin to putting the wrong fuel in your car and then blaming the car manufacturer that your car won’t go.
- mag-stripe. Considering they are a Korean company, I don’t blame them for dropping a complex feature used by a select few in the US. Because the US is the only country left that thinks the ancient technology of the magnetic stripe is still a good medium for the transfer of your bank details. Contact-less paymemt is now pretty much standard everywhere else and is so much more secure and standardised. The range and reliability of the contact-less payment has increased massively for me on the S23 in comparison to the S20 which was also lumbered with magstipe support.
- dilution of features? Again, why should it be more complicated? A larger phone can incorporate more lenses, screen and battery, but the core features and benefits should be the same to make the choice simpler for the consumer. Advertising of the range is simpler also.
Each to their own but these are just my views based on 11 years in the mobile phone retail business.
I respectfully disagree, and I know this is a hot button topic. But isn’t the fact that it IS a controversial topic that has trawled for 3+ years on various tech forums not evidence that it’s a popular enough feature(s) to warrant consideration?
SD Card: If companies are so afraid of liability, they could simply have an initial warning dialogue about potential hardware failures. Why cripple a portion of your userbase because of the fault of others? I know it’s anecdotal, but I have used 9 SD cards across various devices (including my current N20U and Tab S8 Ultra) without ever encountering an issue. I also back up my data as is proper data management. And just as the car company in your example would say to the idiot who filled it up with the wrong gas, they would refer them to the user manual (warning dialogue in this case), and dust their hands of the matter. And let’s be honest, this is just a blatant cash grab to force customers to buy the larger storage sizes.
Mag-Stripe: There are still more shops that don’t have the standard contactless payment where I live than there are that do. And I’m in Southern CA. Big box stores are not an issue, but the mom and pop shops that I frequent don’t have it set up. I’m sure this is an issue that will eventually be solved, but it’s just frustrating that the option was taken away from us.
Dilution of Features: Samsung already makes a huge range of phones. From $120 semi-disposable ones to $2K Folds. The consumer is confused enough. From A series, J, S, M, Fold, and Flip, every price is covered. And yet, what’s the flagship (mainstream) phone? The S23U? For $1400, you get an extra camera compared to the S23+. You get a larger screen - which used to be the Note’s job - plus another camera from the base 23. That $400-600 difference adds up to 1 camera (plus some sensors) and a larger screen and battery. Point being, the reason why I gravitated to the Note series before was because of all the jammed packed features in a single phone. I didn’t have to decide if I wanted to feel FOMO for saving $400 and losing an extra camera. What I paid was what I got, and I knew I got the most bang for my buck.
I know this is controversial, but this is the hill I’m dying on. Samsung’s reputation was built on “everything but the kitchen sink” when they were competing with LG, HTC, etc. Now? They’re a naming convention from Pro and Pro Max away from another lawsuit with Apple. Who, by the way, brought SD cards back onto their flagship laptop series!
Re. the Mag-Stripe. Bare in mind the US is <10% of the market for the Samsung phones. And then you’d need to break down of the Samsung phones sold in North America - how many of those were S-series vs. the others which don’t support the mag-stripe. Even if 50-50, that’s now <5% of phones which have mag-stripe support in a country that uses it. Then rough guess of 20% of users actually pay by phone? You’re now <1%. A small pale blue dot in the vast cosmic arena…
SD cards - there’s also the point of user data security. Data stored on an SD card can’t be easily guarenteed safe by Knox. Yes, you can encrypt it, but remove that SD card and the card itself can’t protect the data from brute forcing encyption keys.
Wasn’t Samsung holding ~30% share in the US? I was trying to find more concrete numbers, but Google isn’t Google anymore. What I could find says that North America is their #1 revenue producing region, which leads me to believe that the majority of their revenue is coming from their S series. This is conjecture, but absent more public data, it’s what logically makes sense to me. And since the US is the major market to not be on universal contactless payment systems, I would assume would benefit it’s customers the most.
SD Card - The consumer has about as much control as trusting their data to cloud storages or even at-home NAS or hard drive set ups. They could get robbed, or they could have another daily data breach somewhere. Safety with your SD card contains similar risks. And like you said in your other response to another user, Samsung already mines your data, Knox or not. So why not include an SD card, so that people can save $200 on storage teirs (corporate greed aside)? If the hacker really wants my SD card data anyways, they’ll get to indulge in my vast library of audiobooks, podcasts, music, movies, and files that would make absolutely no sense to them, even if they were corporate spies. So congrats to them. Pictures and videos would be painful to let them peruse, but that could be said about any stolen phone or data breach.
You misunderstood. The US is <10% of Samsung phone sales globally (I found retail sales online for their handset sales per country) . And they will know the stats of which of those phones ever used the magstripe feature. An educated guess of <1% of global users activating the mag stripe feature is a feature they can afford to cut, especially if it saves on cost.
As for the SD cards, I’ve never over the 10+ years of using smartphones have had data lost on an SD card (and I’ve used some cheap and sketchy SD cards). The one exception is a Samsung SD card that after being retired from the phone, reformatted and sitting in a drawer for a year refused to being recognized on my PC when I checked my old cards to see what’s what and who’s where.
I’d rather trash my replaceable SD card with writes from the camera, downloads, streaming cache etc than the non-replaceable eMMC memory. It’s cheaper and less environmentally damaging to replace a failed 30€ SD card than to replace the whole phone (or the motherboard) because of the failed eMMC.
These days I use high-endurance SD cards that are designed to be used in eg dash cams, action cameras etc under constant writes and should be really safe for storage in a phone. And all my photos/videos are synced to my NAS via Syncthing in realtime, anyway (over Tailscale VPN or Syncthing relays).
The other issues with SD card is security. Your data isn’t safely tucked away, controlled by Knox if it’s on a SD card which can be removed. And ‘letting the user choose’ just means that there needs to be configuration and extra options in firmware, which leads to backdoors and workarounds and a higher chance of comprimsed user data. (When they’re not just stealing it off your device and selling it anyway…).
There’s nothing preventing encryption being done to a SD card so there’s no reason the SD card could encrypt files on it so it’s only readable through the phone or after putting in the password. Like how Samsung lets you export encrypted a back up of your apps with appdata to a SD card connected through USB C with their Smart Switch app, which is needed now since they don’t back up 3rd party apps to the cloud anymore. https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-cloud-third-party-app-data/
Also, most people want SD card so they can just offload pictures, videos, and music as opposed to running apps off it. The cons don’t seem like cons for me.
It’s not people are forced to use a SD card so this stuff seems more like devil’s advocate.
Asus Zenfone 10 looks quite feature complete before the break, maybe you should consider it.
It doesn’t have a SD card slot, unfortunately. At the moment, only Sony Xperia still carries it on the flagship level, so I’m eyeing that one for now. Fortunately, my N20U is still going strong, so I’ll see what the field looks like when I upgrade. I guess whichever OEM decides to include a $0.50 piece of hardware will probably get my $1K+.
Still loving my N20U. Not feeling any huge urge to upgrade; we’ll see if lack of new versions of Android changes my mind
Mixed opinions.
Things I like about Samsung:
- Feature-rich hardware and software
- 4 years of OS updates compared to 3 by Google
- S Pen in Note/Ultra
- Foldables
- Keeping Android tablets and Android-compatible smartwatches alive when Google abandoned them. Huge props for that.
Things I dislike:
- Making fun of Apple and then doing the exact same things they did: removing the headphone jack, display notch, removing the charger in the box.
- They even got rid of expandable storage in the S series despite being a major manufacturer of micro SDs.
- Samsung’s software is notorious for being slow, generally inferior compared to Google’s and not the most well-designed out there.
- I tried both the Galaxy A52 and a Pixel 6a at Best Buy. The A52 was lagging. I bought the 6a.
- They’re edging towards anti-repair.
- Certain Samsung smartwatch features only work if you have a Samsung phone.
It just seems like every brand does the make fun of Apple then doing the exact thing they did thing.
I bought a Samsung because it was the only device with a headphone jack and removable battery. I have zero brand loyality - I just go with whoever makes the best device
Samsung is a shit company and nobody should ever buy anything from them. Phones, TVs, appliances, it doesn’t matter – it’s all either pre-infested with ads and malware or sabotaged with planned obsolescence.
You and I must have ad the same Samsung experience.
A couple years ago you could replace that with Apple (except for the ads part i think), does that still apply or has apple seen any kind of redemption?
Just completely not true. I love my pixel phones, but apple takes care of its customers like no other company, while Samsung shits on its customers like no other company.
Only as long as you pay protection(apple care).
And bend over backwards.
Because of the bloat and their Knox bullshit making it difficult to impossible to remove said bloat with a custom ROM, I will not touch a Samsung phone.
Very fair point.
Hardware:
They make high-quality hardware and I like that they’re trying to do something new and interesting with foldable tech, but I’ve never been a fan of their Exynos processors and foldables (imo) have proven to be little more than a gimmick that sacrifices far too much on durability for minimal benefit to most people.
Software:
I hate bloatware, and I’m not a fan of their crusade against open bootloaders.
Good photos and the battery lasts quite a while too compared to my other phones I’ve had.
Overall it’s great hardware with good photos and terrible software for me. I’ll probably never buy it on a phone again because they’re evolving in the way I’d rather not have them evolve.
They have their own unremovable:
- contacts
- calendar
- browser
- phone
- messages
- app store
Makes me feel like they’re stealing all my info if I would use it. Besides a Google account they also want you to use a Samsung account which ( honestly ) makes the whole phone more confusing ( especially to older people like my parents ).
But yeah. Good photos and great battery life. I’ve got no real complaints of the tab s5 tablet which I use when travelling and streaming shows to the tv otherwise. Though I’d have to see if the newer tablets are as much of a dumpster fire software wise like their phones.
Side note: I even had somebody come up to me with their phone “because I work in IT”. The default setting of a Samsung phone was to have the lock button activate bigsby rather than lock the phone. There’s a setting somewhere to change that. But it definitely felt agressive pushing of bigsby that nobody ( at least around here ) uses/wants to use… Maybe it’s different in other countries?
Great hardware, especially as far as the screens. Questionable software environment. Last I had one, there were duplicates of most Google apps in inferior Samsung form, which was really useless, and they couldn’t be deleted (I think). While the display was s beautiful, another thing I didn’t like was I had one of the ones with curved glass on the sides, a Galaxy S9, which looked cool, was useless, and it ended up getting cracked on the side, so it was useless and fragile.
Have you tried the Active series? I think they have the same spec, just… bulkier, great for butterfingers like me.
I don’t think they’ve had an “Active” phone since S7 though? I know there’s the Xcover series, but it isn’t tied to the S line, I wonder if it’s targetting the same niche
I looked it up. The last one is the S8 Active.
Xcover is a silly name though.
I’ve only had a Galaxy S3 and the S9.
Typing from a Samsung Galaxy A50 right now, as a long time Samsung user. I’ve always hated TouchWiz from the older days, but I really love One UI. I’d even go as far as to say that One UI is the best Android skin (controversial opinion, lol)!
Same. I don’t get so this hate. It’s like people still think it’s touchwiz and have never used one ui. I actually prefer one ui far more than stock android.
Flagship has no headphone jack or even micro SD card. Absolute joke.
If they had those I would strongly consider buying. I was an LG person until they stopped making phones.
Just curious, why in the modern day do you need an SD card?
If phones can come up to a TB nowadays and USBCs have insane transfer speeds I can’t really find a reason why you’d need more.
Far cheaper to buy a microsd than a bigger capacity phone, and if you get the base model and run out of storage theres no way to upgrade.
First, price. The Samsung Galaxy Ultra is $1,299 for 256GB, $1,379 for 512GB, and $1,619 for 1TB (only available as an unlocked phone.
That’s a $180 premium to add 256GB. You can get an SD card for that much for $25, also from Samsung. To go from 512 to 1TB is $240, while a 512GB SD card costs around $35. It’s Apple levels of ridiculous markup.
Both SD cards and internal storage can vary in speed, but I would expect SD cards to be slower most of the time. And that’s fine. I view it just like how in desktops you might have a large, cheap, SATA SSD or HDD for bulk storage and a fast NVME for things where speed matters.
Why would I bother with USB C file transfer? That seems like something annoying to manage- having to remember to go and back things up, transfer things over, and just generally maintain. Especially with WiFi speeds nowadays. But that is for backups for the sake of redundancy. Moving files off the phone to make room because of low storage means removing a layer of redundancy.
The Steam Deck has an SD card, as does the switch and all of their handheld competitors. My Xperia has an SD card. The Samsung A series still has an SD card, and so do most mid-tier phones. It’s something useful that most people want, but Samsung and others know they can cut the $0.50/phone or whatever and the whales will still buy the newest flagship as a status symbol anyways.
Because I want more storage.
I hear you. I was using a OnePlus6 until a couple of years ago when changes at my mobile provider requires that I change. Ended up getting an LG Velvet that I’m still using.
I have never used a Samsung phone either, though it’s looking more and more likely that one of them will be my next phone.
Unpopular opinion, but I love my Samsung phone - upgraded from an S9 to S21 not that long ago. I’m not a brand (or even OS) loyalist by any means, and Samsung has its flaws, but it’s the phone that suits my needs the most.
Firstly, I need a “small-ish” phone for one-handed use during my commute in the subway. Of all the flagships, Samsung’s is one of the few that has the triple-camera setup in a small form factor. Every other major phone maker puts the regular and ultrawide camera in the smaller flagship, and the zoom only comes in the bigger version.
Secondly, I’ve absolutely hated the new Android UI since… 12? The quick toggles are ridiculously big, and it makes me feel like i’m using kids’ mode on my phone. And who thought it was a good idea to put the Wifi/data toggles behind a second layer of menu options? Samsung’s UI fixes this right out of the box without a need for root.
As for the cons… I remember my S4 used to have horrible preinstalled software that came in the root partition and couldn’t be uninstalled. But the newest Samsungs aren’t that bad. It came with a few extra things, almost all of which could be uninstalled easily. Samsung also installs their own version of Calculator, Notes etc - some of them aren’t bad at all, and the only annoying thing about their own utilities are that they force you to update them through Samsung’s own app store. Their camera also tends to oversaturate colors, but it’s a one-time effort to dial down the default saturation in the camera settings.
So yeah, the software has a few issues, but they’re all a one-off fix, whereas my issue with other Android phones (no triple-camera setup in a smaller form factor + horrible quick toggles) are not fixable or require root.
Oh yeah. and Samsung DeX is amazing. I’m surprised Android doesn’t have an equivalent feature. I love it when I can plug my phone into a monitor or TV at a hotel or a friend’s house and play movies/games off my phone.
