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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

Screwing up once happens, even if it shouldn't. Doing it twice will seriously shatter peoples trust in these devices and make them think twice before purchasing a new Samsung phone again. Samsung is a behemoth but this can really hurt their smartphone division.

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After 2 years my S2 became a slow unfunctional piece of dead tech. I tried resetting it through the Samsung tools, which didn't help, so I rooted it and tried different versions of basic android on it, which didn't help. At the same time I had two friends who were experiencing the same kinds of problems, who let me toy with their phones.

It's completely anecdotal but three similar model phones breaking in exactly the same manner at exactly the same period in their lives was enough to put me off Samsung for good.

It's been some years since and I've seen Samsung in one scandal after another. Like the time they had an entire range of flatscreen tvs break because they put the transistors too close to the cooling plates, fixing it by moving the transistors but replacing the $0.5 piece with a Samsung produced transistor which they've never sold, making repairs nearly impossible.

To match an anecdote with an anecdote - I've been using S4 for 3 years, and then gave it to my brother (I've upgraded to S7 with contract renewal), who's been using it for the past year too. The phone is still going strong. Feels slow-ish today, true, but still better than some of the cheaper Android phones OOTB.

I blame Android's continued bloat creep[0] for that slowdown though. My brother had S3 before, and so does my SO, and they were all becoming less and less usable with time and each system update...

[0] - Is there an official term for the phenomenon that software bloats expands to cancel out any improvements in hardware?

Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

My second S4 is still going strong -- the first one was replaced by Sprint in early 2015 after the screen died. Pretty good for a phone released in 2013.

But to be fair I don't do system updates so I don't experience the gradual slowdown that comes with increasing software bloat.

My original Galaxy S is still pretty usable if i turn off internet access because Google services have became so large they don't fit in memory.

The unofficial term is "human bias causing measurement error"

You have either filled the phone storage or installed too many apps.

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