Consumer Technology 2019 Samsung Unpacked Event

[elbobo]

playing with it a bit I love the fingerprint scanner, just touch the phone and boom you are in. Don't like the edge display, never understood the point of them and double clicking the power button for the camera is awkward  

[Joe]

10 minutes ago, elbobo said:

playing with it a bit I love the fingerprint scanner, just touch the phone and boom you are in. Don't like the edge display, never understood the point of them and double clicking the power button for the camera is awkward  

 

Fingerprint scanner works perfectly? Some had complained that it doesnt work well.

[elbobo]

21 minutes ago, Jose said:

 

Fingerprint scanner works perfectly? Some had complained that it doesnt work well.

 

works instantly for me and I still have the factory screen protector on 

[Jason]

31 minutes ago, Jose said:

 

Fingerprint scanner works perfectly? Some had complained that it doesnt work well.

 

I had to redo the registration on my fingerprints to get my right fingerprint to reliably register. Coming from an S7 I think there's two main differences that were causing people to have problems. One is the amount of pressure you need to use to register the fingerprints is NOT the amount of pressure you need to use to unlock the device. The other is that unlike with readers like on the S7, where you could leave your fingerprint until the screen unlocked, it seems like a press and release is preferred. 

 

I think it works great, it's just slightly different than other readers in terms of how to use it. I've also seen other people change their mind on how they feel about it once they got tips on how to use it. 

[Jason]

BTW, if anyone needs a wallpaper:

 

[Emblazon]

I like the Wall·E one. 

[Jason]

This battery life is crazy. I left my apartment last night at 90% battery, didn't plug in overnight, and am still only down to 48%. My phone says I'm a few minutes short of being 17 hours on battery. As I think I said above, I did turn on the option to dynamically be more aggressive about battery saving when you don't use the phone for an extended period of time, but it doesn't seem to be  slowing down the phone or anything, so I don't see why you wouldn't turn it on considering it seems like it just keeps your phone from needlessly chewing through battery while you're not using it. 

 

And I would have been thrilled with 12 hours on battery, to be honest.

 

I can see not even charging this phone every day, which on top of just being convenient should be good for the longetivity of the battery. 

 

Also, we'll see how it's holding up in a month but so far this included screen protector seems to be pretty solid. 

[Jason]

It does go through battery faster if you're actively using the phone a ton, obviously, but to give you an idea I'd say maybe 10%-15% in a gym session (using the phone a lot due to logging reps, using it on a cardio machine, etc). But the biggest thing was that I felt like my S7 would guzzle battery even just being in my pocket and that I had to a actively remember to turn on one of the more extreme battery saving modes if I didn't expect to be using my phone much and mostly just needed to be able to get an Uber at the end of the night. 

[Jason]

P.S. I just saw that medium power saving was enabled but I'm unsure if that was something I did by accident or if the phone turned that on itself. But I couldn't tell that it was enabled from how the phone was performing, FWIW, I just happened to have the quick settings panel expanded and noticed it was on. 

[Jason]

On 3/8/2019 at 12:33 PM, elbobo said:

playing with it a bit I love the fingerprint scanner, just touch the phone and boom you are in. Don't like the edge display, never understood the point of them and double clicking the power button for the camera is awkward  

 

I definitely don't really see what the curved display is adding but it's not nearly as objectionable as I was worried about. And I got an Incipio case that protects the sides of the screen. 

 

For the camera thing, Samsung lets you remap the Bixby button, so I mapped a single press to to bring up the camera. It lets you select what to do with a single or double press (the other stays mapped to Bixby, and a long hold will always be Bixby) but it's less awkward than dealing with the power button. 

[elbobo]

after about a 14 hour day I still had 60% on my battery 

[Dre801]

My Note 9 just got the Android 9 update.  Not sure how I feel about the look of thus OneUI thing yet.

[Joe]

14 minutes ago, Dre801 said:

My Note 9 just got the Android 9 update.  Not sure how I feel about the look of thus OneUI thing yet.

 

What provider do you have? Still waiting for the S8+ to get it.

[Dre801]

1 minute ago, Jose said:

 

What provider do you have? Still waiting for the S8+ to get it.

Verizon.

[Jason]

1 hour ago, Jose said:

 

What provider do you have? Still waiting for the S8+ to get it.

 

You didn't get the unlocked one straight from Samsung, did you?

[Joe]

8 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

You didn't get the unlocked one straight from Samsung, did you?

 

Unlocked from Verizon, but I am with TMobile now. 

[Jason]

On 3/20/2019 at 10:48 AM, BlueAngel said:

Got my buds, sound quality is really good for Bluetooth buds I wasn't expecting this kind of quality. Definitely better than the included AKG buds in the box which are really good themselves.

 

Just got the email that mine have shipped. There's somehow two results for the tracking number, one for a shipment to Vancouver, WA and another to Syracuse, NY. Never seen multiple results for the same tracking number before (and neither one is me). 

[Jason]

1 minute ago, BlueAngel said:

That's really odd.

 

I still don't get how it brought up TWO old records, but anyhow, I guess Samsung just got a little ahead of FedEx on sending out the tracking number, because now it's showing arriving on Thursday. 

[Jason]

@BlueAngel mine came today. Have you had any issues with getting the wireless power sharing from the S10+ working? My phone charges fine wirelessly, plus I took off my case to double-check if it was that and even that didn't help. The wireless power sharing initially worked but then wouldn't work after using the earbuds for a few minutes.

[Jason]

On 3/30/2019 at 1:59 PM, BlueAngel said:

Haven't really messed with it honestly, I've got a wireless fast charging pad that I use to charge the buds and about 5 chargers throughout the house so I've never really tried to use it. I do know you have to have the placement just right and I'm sure any issues with it will be fixed with an update.

 

Yeah, I've intermittently managed to get it to work, so I was already starting to conclude that it was probably about the positioning being really finicky. I guess I'll pick up a flat wireless charging pad, but it'd still be nice to figure this out for, like, wanting to top up the charge from the phone while traveling.

[Jason]

18 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

Just had my phone replaced, I ran into that known bug that pre-order phones seem to develop. LTE connectivity was pretty much hit or miss, random service drops and missed calls or random other funny business. Apparently the modem burns out due to a bug in the early models so we shall see what the new one does, I totally bypassed my insurance and went directly to Sprint Executive Services and they sent me a brand new phone.

 

What was your clue-in that something was wrong? Where I live the cellular towers going over capacity is a relatively regular occurrence, which makes it hard to be sure where the problem is. 

[Jason]

2 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

Seeing the reports of others having the same issues, one day the phone was fine then the next I couldn't do anything unless on WiFi, no streaming music or using LTE period (full bars just no data being transmitted). It's not a network dependent issue either so others on T-Mobile and Verizon have had the issue. New phone is perfect though no issues back to launch day, I did notice over the last two months that the reception has gotten progressively worse, not anymore!

 

See, the "full bars of LTE but no data being transmitted" thing happens here a lot when it gets too crowded. On Sunday for example there was some kind of marathon or triathlon, and I couldn't even send a text message without going on airplane mode and turning on wifi to force the phone to not try to send the text over cellular, and this happened with my S7 too during busy periods. Every year during the LA Marathon, for example. So I really have no way of knowing if that also had anything to do with my S10+ having problems.

[Jason]

On 6/5/2019 at 6:04 AM, BlueAngel said:

Go to an area that you know isn't crowded and test it out lol, I'm having no issues now it's awesome.

 

See, it's legit bad enough that I'm not even sure where I'd go to be 100% certain I'm in an area where the issue definitely isn't with the tower being congested.

[Jason]

1 hour ago, BlueAngel said:

Android 10 has been released for a few carriers here in the US, Sprint, T-Mobile and Xfinity so far. Samsung has really upped their game with software updates.

 

It just started automatically downloading on my Verizon S10+.

[Joe]

No S8 love. Boooo.

[Joe]

20 minutes ago, BlueAngel said:

S8 is ancient at this point.

 

Nah, still works like a dream.

[Jason]

@BlueAngel have you installed it? I'd be curious to know what your impression of battery life is after the update in a day or two.

[Jason]

20 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

@Jasonso how are you liking it? 

 

Initially I thought the battery was dropping a little unusually fast but it seems like that's evened out. Does Android keep running some residual update stuff in the background after an update? If so that could explain it since I was using the phone as soon as it booted back up from the update. My phone was previously showing me ~2 days on a single charge and now it's showing me more like ~1 but I never really bought that 2 day estimate anyhow. 

 

Otherwise it seems basically the same, but snappier, which is a good thing. My biggest complaint is that it pops up a list of available wifi networks as soon as you toggle it on, which it didn't used to do. (I have that "show wifi popup" setup off, this is just when I toggle wifi on, not every single time it sees an available network).

 

I also dislike that it's now harder to see on the battery graph when it was last fully charged.  Seems more objective than the estimated battery life. 

 

[Emblazon]

On 3/3/2020 at 7:22 PM, BlueAngel said:

Got my S20 Ultra yesterday, it's amazing I couldn't see going back to a non 120Hz display it's mind blowing. If you thought iOS devices were fast you haven't seen anything, no longer is Android not as fluid it's better.

Marques Brownlee is saying the camera really isn’t very good, and the 100x zoom is a gimmicky as it ever was. 

 

While I really liked my 90Hz One Plus 7 Pro screen, when I went back to 60 on the iPhone, it didn’t take much to re-acclimate to, and unless I was using something else, with a higher refresh rate, along side my iPhone, it’s not something that would even matter. Would I like to have a higher refresh rate on my phone? Sure. Is that what would get me to upgrade? Nope. 
 

There’s only one thing that could get me to upgrade to the 12 this year—no notch. That’s it. The camera punch out is just as annoying to me. The One Plus 7 Pro’s screen was glorious. And since I’m not leaving iPhone again anytime soon (my girls won’t let me), that’s the only iPhone I’ll upgrade to—no notch.