Samsung Galaxy S II – Over 3 million units sold in 55 days | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Galaxy S II – Over 3 million units sold in 55 days

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49 pointsGarbage29 comments

The phone may be flagship now, but won't be in 12 months when I will still want it to work well given how expensive it is.

With a history of poor support and lack of updates across all vendors, I'm not buying any Android device until Cyanogen runs on it.

Samsung has apparently sent a Cyanogen developer a phone, but they are struggling: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15000396&...

Samsung is part of the newly formed Android Alliance [1] that promises updates for 18 months.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/05/10/io-2011-android-alli...

What does that mean though? The Samsung Galaxy Tab has no sign of Android 3.1 on it; the latest is 2.3, and last I checked it was only available in Italy; people in the UK are on 2.2 and have been waiting months. According to another comment on this post, the Galaxy S II is already an update behind.

What qualifies as a timely update?

That is my problem right now, I won't buy an android until cyanogen runs on it and it is easily rooted, so when my droid first gen finally broke I actually ended up buying an iphone as all the comparative weren't listed as meeting my requirements.

I hope when my iphone breaks the ecosystem is better (so far I only really miss native gmail and having an actual filesystem to use with the apps.)

Yeah, it kinda sucks that there's no Cyanogen phone on Verizon right now. I'm not moving to Verizon until that happens. I'm hoping it will with the SGS II.

I believe I read that the S II had entirely open source drivers, which suggested to me than the Cyanogoen folk might have an easier time with long term support. (I believe they also sent phones to several such developers). And given the high sales, I was certain it would be well supported by the community. Sad to see they've hit a stumbling block, this could certainly sway my intended purchase to a rival device.

As a Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) buyer there I no way I would touch this phone. Samsung took nearly a year to go from 2.1 to 2.2, and seeing 2.3.4 on the original S line is highly unlikely.

I think Samsung makes some great hardware (I'm typing this on a Galaxy Tab 10.1), but until they start showing more support for existing hardware, I do not plan to purchase anything else from them.

Not a concern for me, since I will be running 3rd party ROMs on my phone to both upgrade to the latest version of Android faster and remove any excess cruft that the manufacturers and cell networks like to cram in there.

This happened without even being launched in USA. I imagine it could've easily doubled up if it did.

Unfortunately, because the hardware is new enough not to have any custom ROMs available, anyone who owns one of these phones is stuck on Android 2.3.3, and that rev of the OS happens to have a few kernel bugs that cause significant battery drain. Still no ETA on a 2.3.4 update for the phone, despite the fact that other phones have had it for weeks.

This and other examples of bad customer support from Samsung kind of dampen the appeal of the hardware. At this point, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a new phone. It's particularly embarrassing that they shipped these devices even though the power drain issues should have been detected during QA.

It is still a ridiculously quick and awesome phone though!

I went from a Nokia 5800 XM to a SGS2 and the battery life isn't that bad.

I've had the phone last like 24h with decent usage (meaning it was one of the first days I had it).

Do you really expect to get more with a smart phone these days? I don't know how long the iphone 4 lasts but my friend that has one seems to be charging his every day.

Hardware-wise it's a great phone and in the future the updates will come :-)

I personally have no problems recommending this phone to anyone because regardless of it's issues it's still a very good phone.

The battery issues are, oddly enough, specifically regarding idle use - the phone fails to disable wifi when going to sleep and sometimes interrupt handlers that run while the phone is asleep cause it to wake up and peg a core at 100% utilization, killing the battery.

The phone's battery usage while not asleep is actually quite good! And if you disable WiFi, it's less likely you'll hit the bug. But it still happens to me a few times a day, so I have to charge it daily even if I'm not using it - and that's frustrating.

I have a GS2 for the three weeks now and havent seen this issue.In fact, I think the battery life is a lot better then my last phone which was a IPhone 3GS. Is this a common bug?

Is this also true for Samsung Google Nexus S? I intend to buy Samsung Google Nexus S in near future.

Being Google's flagship phone it probably gets a lot more updates directly. :-)

I was considering the Nexus S but ended on a SGS2 because the price here is pretty much the same and the SGS2 is much better.

I used wifi all day at work the past weeks without much problems, but I can understand your frustration if it suddenly eats up a lot of power. After 7 hours idling today my phone is at 81% battery now, but I have only been on the phone for like 20 minutes earlier today so "Android OS" and "Voice calls" have about 25 minutes of cpu usage each, while maps has 15% today for some reason.

My phone runs stock samsung android since I just got it:

Android 2.3.3 GINGERBREAD.XWKE2 Linux Kernel 2.6.35.7

Some of my buddies who have Android phones claim that poor battery life is due to the cheap background apps that come with the phone and run all the time in background. Even after those apps are killed, within few hours they respawn and keep hogging the holy electric juice.

Can you post a list of your default, background processes and idea on their CPU usage?

Currently I have the following services/processes running in the background:

  3G watchdog
  Bump
  Spotify 
  DRM Content
  Software update
  Android system
  Task manager
  Voice commands
  Digital Clock
  Social Hub
  Social Hub (again, different icon)
  Accuweather widget
  Google services
  Maps
  IMEITracker
  Wi-fi sharing
  Email
  Vortex Galaxy (live wallpaper)
  Samsung keypad

Currently using 217MB ram total.

I have never used/not configured the following things:

  Social Hub
  Voice commands
  Email (besides Gmail but that is not what is running)

I haven't used maps today but I have not rebooted the phone since I did a few days ago so it might be stuck from then.

As for the CPU usage I am not sure since it does not show cpu usage for services as far as I can tell.

As for applications I can think of that would require background services or cpu usage in any other way:

  Bump
  Notifo (for awesome HN notifications among other things)
  Weather widget
  Gmail
  Dropbox
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Skype

It would probably be nice to find a way to either turn off Social hub (which comes with the phone) or replace the other applications with that. I didn't feel like setting it up so I just went with the normal Facebook/Twitter applications/widgets.

Actually considering removing them both because really they don't really add anything to my life besides making it easier for me to write random thoughts and things on my wall/timeline and there are too many people broadcasting their every move already.

I should probably mention I do use power savings mode all the time but that simply turns off wifi/gps/stuff whenever it's not needed which I think should be default anyway.

Eek! This reply turned out huge :|

It could have been many more, if only the sold the damn thing in the US... ;)

Is that sales to customers or sales to retailers?

Not that it matters (it is, however, interesting), but the iPhone sold about eleven million times in 55 days during the last quarter. (They sold 18.65 million units in Q2 2011. That number also includes quite a lot of iPhone 3GS so it’s not really a fair comparison. Let’s say six million iPhone 4?)

Just to repeat myself: This is not in any way surprising or special. Android is on many different devices and there is no one definite Android device. Should there ever be one device that over a longer time outsells the iPhone Apple will be in deep, deep trouble if they want to retain their market share.

In a way, it's not that surprising because we kind of expected it since it's such a great phone. But what is surprising though is that even with so many other Android alternatives out there, this Android phone alone manages to get pretty close to the numbers of a newly launched iPhone.

Many people don't realize that one of the reasons why the iPhone sells so much more than any single Android phone in general, is exactly because there is only one such phone every year. Imagine if Apple sold 10-20 different iPhone models every year. You could see why even though the total market share would probably rise a bit, any single iPhone model would sell a lot less than the current one-per-year models.

So yes the iPhone is great and Apple is a great company, too, but that's not the only reason the iPhone usually outsells any single Android device out there by a large margin. It's also because people can choose from a tens of different Android devices, too.

It doesn't really get close to the launch numbers of the iPhone. (Pre-iPhone 4 launch numbers, sure, but the market as a whole is growing so quickly that those comparisons don't make sense at all.)

Also there are a lot of much cheaper, if not free, Android phones. I'm sure if people could get an iPhone for free they would "sell" many more.

Nobody is getting the phones for free, of course. Samsung makes the same amount of money on the phone whether you pay $0 and the carrier pays $529 or you pay $529 and the carrier pays $0.

I fear you completely misunderstood me, actually.

Apple sells a lot more 4s than 3GSes.

There are two iOS phones. There are dozens upon dozens of Android phones. It's a big deal that one specific model is doing so well. Samsung alone has eight current models being marketed on its US site and that doesn't even include the Galaxy S II since it isn't being sold here...

Uhm, I fear you completely misunderstood me.

I didn’t say anything about whether three million sold devices are impressive or not. I don’t think I made any judgment at all about Samsung’s performance. In fact I have this huge long disclaimer saying (twice!) that the iPhone merely selling much better than one Android device is not surprising or special. It on itself doesn’t tell you too much.

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