- when you search for an app and it's not on your phone, the first place it wants to take you to, before the Play Store, is the freaking Galaxy store (who uses that?!)
- the share panel contains a giant ad for some online storage service by Samsung
- the built-in system utility apps use a different version upgrade system than the play store, requiring you to approve some of them manually
Etc.
Feels like hardware is good but is used to peddle inferior services.
Samsung's only differentiation right now is their proprietary software, Samsung Pay, DeX, Linux on DeX and other toys they make for corporate clients and certain markets like USA
I've been saying for years that Windows 10 is the only sane, productivity-oriented OS for tablets. DeX makes me want to reconsider Android in this role again.
Windows still has its upsides but I carry my damn computer in my pocket now. Can't beat my portable setup!
DeX allowed me to use android much more like a chromebook and less like an android phone, so liberating since all the mouse support and peripheral support is there. Enables me to be a very nimble and streamlined youtuber.
Tons of options for both recording and livestreaming games from DeX and editing footage in Premiere or Kinemaster is awesome. Can realistically film and edit just about anything with just my s10.
I dont find it to be a toy but some people don't believe its important to have a good mobile wallet. Apple could have adopted LoopPay before samsung aquired them but now I'm kinda stuck buying samsung phones/watches just so I can use MST haha
This is my second Galaxy Note model; I've also had a Note 4. Pace Steve Jobs, I really do love having the stylus.
I recommend Marques Brownlee's review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVWLD3064Ng
Some drawbacks that he doesn't mention:
Getting used to no front facing camera takes getting used to. There's no autobrightness! The phone doesn't know when you put your ear up to it! I was able to get used to these things.
I have found the under the screen finger print reader taking some time to get used to. It was frustrating at first, but I eventually got it down. The key is to remember that the screen might be dirty if it fails to read your fingerprint.
Technically, this is not because of the lack of front-facing camera; these things are handled by a separate front-facing sensors (that's why smartphones usually have more than one camera-like thingies on top). They could've retained those features while doing away with front-facing cam; I guess they wanted to go all in and stretch the screen all the way to the phone's top edge.
Yes there is. The ambient light sensor is under the display.
>The phone doesn't know when you put your ear up to it!
Either yours is broken or you're 'holding it wrong', because mine works fine for both features...
Briefly considered the OnePlus 7 Pro before purchasing my S10+, but the below par camera, lack of a headphone jack and other compromises was a deal breaker for me. They seemed to have improved the Camera performance since launch though.
At least now, Samsung delivers updates. At one point, not so long ago, any non-flagship Samsung device was stuck on the version of Android that it shipped with, unless you were willing to root it and install your own ROM.
Then, there's the fact that Samsung insists on shipping its own e-mail, messaging and contact management applications, which are very difficult to back up. There's nothing quite like having to tell someone who bought a new phone that they have to type out all of their contacts by hand, because they used Samsung's contacts app instead of Google's.
I had the original Galaxy, the GPS didn't work. At all. It was a minor scandal at the time.
I also owned a Galaxy S3, S5, S7 Edge and the S8 Edge.
I have had phones freeze when trying to answer a call. After an Android version upgrade, the phones usually got much slower, much worse performance. You know I don't really remember all the issues, but I remember that each time I upgraded to the next version I was hoping some horrible thing I was dealing with would be fixed in the next version only for the next version to have it's own horrible problem. I eventually gave up and switched to LG. I owned an LGv30 and LGv40 and now I'm using the OnePlus 7 Pro.
Interesting. Because of those exact issues I abandoned LG and my wife abandoned Huawei, and we both run on Samsung flagships, on which we never had that happen.
I wonder if anyone ever published a root-cause analysis of problems like "otherwise seemingly stable Android freezes when trying to answer a call". It's a ridiculous thing to happen to a smartphone, and yet it keeps happening. I don't want to criticize too much as it's not as if I could write a better OS myself, but God I miss the old feature-phone experience, with soft-realtime OSes that had more-less stable delays on everything, so you could quickly learn to operate it without looking, as you knew how long doing any given thing would take.