Hacker News Reader

Comment by lomegor | Hacker News Reader

"Galaxy S III can't do like Facebook and Twitter integration, AirPlay"

What does this mean? That Android doesn't have Facebook and Twitter integration? Their apps are not baked in the OS, but Android intents take care of the rest, and you can easily add your accounts to it. Am I missing something?

It's true that it doesn't have AirPlay, but it has a lot of similar capabilities with different names, whereas the iPhone 5 doesn't have the possibility of any of the characteristics of Samsung marketing terms in the ad (like S-Beam or Smart Stay).

View on HN

Facebook and Twitter (and Dropbox, and WhatsApp, and you mention it) 'integration' works so much better on Android than iOS, I don't even know why they mention it.

Try sharing a picture from your camera roll to any other service than the ones baked in the OS on iOS, tough luck.

What the heck are S-Beam and Smart Stay?

S-Beam uses NFC to initiate a Wi-fi Direct connection between devices to transfer files/pics/links etc.

Smart Stay is a feature which uses the front facing camera to check if the users eyes are looking at the display and won't time out the display when the timeout threshold is reached.

smart stay works really well btw as long as you are in a well lit room.

When is it actually useful? I can't recall the last time my iPhone locked the screen while I was using it. In most cases I'm periodically interacting with the device. When I'm not interacting with it but I'm using it, that typically means there's some video content on the screen, which prevents lockouts implicitly, or some app is displaying changing data, and apps can also disable the lockout when appropriate.

I'm not trying to say here that "omg iOS is better", I'm genuinely curious as to when this feature actually makes a difference. Seems to me all it's going to do is suck up power running a camera. And the idea of having the front-facing camera on at all times is also a bit sketchy. It'd be like having my computer's webcam on at all times.

it is useful - I do read a lot of text on my phone - books / and web.

its one of those features you don't advertise though. I mean I wouldn't buy a device just for this but small things like this make people miss them when using another phone / platform. I guess its not the big stuff that build the brand loyalty but these subtle details.

If you're reading text, don't you have to interact with the device to scroll/page the text? Or do Samsung phones have some sort of absurdly low timeout? I could imagine this feature being useful if the screen typically locked itself after, say, 20 seconds of inactivity, but a much better solution is to simply increase the lockout time to something reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com