Phabba-dabba-do: Samsung hypes up Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge The grandeur of today's Samsung S6 phabgasm in Barcelona reminded your correspondent of the scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the day dawned for the announcement of the Answer (to life the universe and everything). Think pop concert, complete with glowing wristbands, dramatic music with drums and a stage the …
>It's the Sony phones that all have waterproofing, not the Samsung.
Samsung do make 'Active' versions of the S4 and S5 that are waterproof, but they have been given a rugged style in addition.
But yeah, waterproofing is Sony's way to distinguish themselves from other high-end Android phones. Samsung's has always been, until now, to be throw all the latest technology together along with removable batteries and SD storage. Now, it seems Samsung are going all in for style and thinness - and I suspect they do have to shed their reputation for plastic.
Perhaps Samsung will release a variant of the S6 with a removable battery, or simply a fatter model with a bigger battery.
Nope its the thundering sound of Samsung owners moving to other brands.. I need a new phone this year and now Samsung have just likely lost my custom, built in Battery I can deal with, no MircoSD though, that is a deal breaker for me....
Those of us who travel a lot tend to fill up that kind of space in no time at all. Think books and movies to keep entertained on long flights, also photos and videos from the destinations, it adds up very quickly and SD cards are the only real solution.
/I'm curious, what do people need SD cards for? The lowest of the low phones comes with 16GB nowadays, and I only use 10.
For me it's mainly pictures, audio books and offline maps. I've got quite a few apps with their own beefy storage requirements meaning that the phone's own storage can start to look a little small. And it also makes a lot of sense to put certain kinds of data on separate media.
Quite a few things. I have a few games that are 2-3 GB each. Offline terrain maps run about 10 GB for the Island. Music, videos etc. Books is a huge one, I have loads for work which take up about 23 GB.
I'm probably highly abnormal (what's new) but I can see others using far more than me just with music and videos.
music for all those times you have no access to a usable data stream, full HD video (3-4GB each), photos and 4K video recording. Add a couple of top end games at 4 GB each and a full backup on the memory card and you could easily fill 128GB or more
"I'm curious, what do people need SD cards for?"
Personally, I don't use it for the extra capacity that much. I use it because it is REMOVABLE storage. It's an easy way to get large amounts of data on or off the phone. I can also perform periodic backups with Titanium Backup, which means if the phone conks out, I can still have a copy of my data that doesn't require some on-line cloud-esque sync solution. Granted, ad SD card can die too, but a phone dying takes a lot more down with it.
The only thing that has kept my s2 useful and in service is the 2 removable sd cards and replacement batteries. I thought about an s4 but can't see rhe point until the s2 dies.
As for space, sat nav takes a few gig, music about 10, photos another 5. Or so. Video maybe 5,games and stuff another 3 plus a backyp for when im playing wirh roms.
I recently worked down in Patagonia for a month and was away from WiFi, the Internet and this thing called 'the cloud' for long time. After 3 weeks of taking personal photos and videos on my Nexus 5 of all the amazing places we passed through, my phone was snapped into two pieces during a particularly eventful day. Needless to say, I lost everything.
If the phone supported a micro SD card I could have popped out out and saved the lot. This is why I'll not buy another phone without removable storage.
Don't draw conclusions about others from your own lack of using the full potential of your tiny, pocket-able computer.
I have 20 GB of music, 32GB of about 7,200 books ranging in subject matter from technical, engineering to medical and also a few novels. Then a few movies, concert videos and downloaded Harvard lectures from Youtube and other tutorials for another 30GB. Beyond that, I take a lot of pictures and video with the phone, which also tends to grab space, so there isn't that much room left on my current 128GB MicroSD.
I can access all this without an internet connection, whenever I need it, as its always in my pocket.
Certainly was never a Samsung "fan", but bought their phones because they offered the features I wanted, which included removable, swappable batteries, a MicroSD card slot (would have preferred two of them), and a high quality plastic that could take a lot of abuse without passing all the pressure on to the glass, like metal does, in case of a drop.
AND, I really can't wait until people find out that the curved part of the phone's display takes on scratches like no tomorrow and looks awful after a few months.
According to an article on the beeb about this new S6, from a little distance it looks awfully similar to the iPhone 6. Moreover, they've ditched the micro SD card slot, a user-replaceable battery, and the waterproofing. Oh yes... and added "Samsung Pay" (USA and Korea only).
By my reckoning Samsung have dropped many of the USPs they and their followers have touted all this time, and have just come up with an iPhone 6 look-a-like with flashing disco lights. Nice.
Thanks for the suggestion, I was thinking of something like that for my works phone. For my personal phone I was looking for something with higher specs than that, or at least I will be in a couple of years when its time to replace my note. There's no reason the note shouldn't last 3-4 years with a couple of battery changes. Screen burn is likely to be its biggest issue. Additional band support is likely to be the only real incentive to upgrade before then. Project ARA (or whatever its called) could make this even less wasteful in the future.
>Honest question, who does a phone these days with a removable battery, SD card slot, decent hardware, and good build quality?
Samsung still do make the S5, k'know! They also make the S5 Active, a waterproof variant with a rugged mae-over.
What do you mean by 'build quality'? Materials, tolerances, proven durability, stiffness?
Thats true, although I am keeping in mind support for tmo's newer band 12 lte. I'm not really after the s series, more worried about them screwing with the note series as that is what I had planned to replace my current note with :( I could just about forgive the loss of the replaceable battery and sd card slot if they did something stunning like made it fold out into a tablet.
As for build quality, just basic better than some chinese bodge job of a reference design with whatever rom kind of makes it start. Samsung, HTC, Nokia, etc all make phones that are well built both hardware and software. Some not so top tier manufacturers seem to be including some headline features like gorilla glass but with second rate quality control (as demonstrated by my niece's never ending saga of how her latest random name brand phone has died yet her ipod thing has survived forever).
Disco lights?
Ok Nexus 4,5 and 6(?) have one led on the front. Download lightflow and every notification can have it flashing in what ever colour you like and at different speeds......I often have 6 different colours on the go....some I look at others mean look at it when ever,
Simple, it works :-)
If this is a sign of what's to come with the next Note then there's no chance of me upgrading. Fast charging won't mitigate the loss of a replaceable battery. The real reason behind a fixed battery is it forces you to junk a working phone once the battery won't hold a respectable charge. I needed a new battery after about 14 months with my note. Easy and cheap enough to replace it With the note 3 but what about this model? A couple of hundred bucks to replace it? I bet their helpful answer is buy an s7.
Phones are already stupidly thin, well beyond it conferring any advantage beyond poser value.
Yes, that along with the climate and also the chemistry of the battery and many other factors. The point being if the battery is non removable then if its 9 months or 14 (and age does play a part as well), it's still a brick at that point whereas if it is replaceable then it is down to whatever else goes terminally wrong first which can take some time. There's no reason not to expect a phone to last 3-4 years, but the battery is not likely to be all that useful at that point, it's already going to be suffering half way through that time. Perhaps it's the yorkshire in me but I don't see the point in trashing a $6-700 phone after a year to 18 months because a $30 part that could be replaceable isn't. Especially when the trade off is just making an already thin phone 1 mm thinner.
I must be part-Yorkie myself ;) I do expect 4 years out of a phone I paid prestige money for, and it'd annoy me too if the battery was a cause for premature replacement.
Another big plus with a removable battery is you can hastily yank it if your (non-waterproofed) phone goes pint-diving or takes a spill, and if you're quick enough you may just save it (managed that with an accidentally inundated laptop recently).
"The lifetime of batteries is a factor of how many recharge cycles they have gone through, not months. If a phone goes two days between charges instead of one day, it will take far longer for the battery to degrade."
Well, there's an issue too.
This is my use case, and I think it's not uncommon: I come home from work, I put my phone in the charge cradle, and if I not going out that night, it stays there until the next morning!
Now, I know this is not the best thing for my battery (and Lord knows, newer versions of Android want to chirp about it every ten minutes when the phone's fully charged [grrr!]), but I'd much rather have a charged phone throughout my workday than to risk a low battery because I forgot to plug the damn thing in at the optimal time. If the battery is removable, I'll just pop a new one in (in 20 seconds, in the comfort of my own home) when the old one starts showing it's age.
The other thing is, it doesn't matter how fast the thing can charge if there's no charger (or mains to power it) around when the battery poops out.
I will gladly bear the burden of an extra millimeter in thickness to be able to change out the battery when I need to!
It should be no different to iPhone, where if the battery starts to show its age then you just get a £20 replacement which takes less than 5 minutes to install. Or just do it yourself,for a fiver. It's really no big deal.
The real problem with the Edge is that it uses Android, which is abominable to begin with. Then Samsung make it even worse by soaking it with bloat.
>Another big plus with a removable battery is you can hastily yank it if your (non-waterproofed) phone goes pint-diving or takes a spill, and if you're quick enough you may just save it (managed that with an accidentally inundated laptop recently).
That's one solution, I guess - though not necessary for some Samsung and Sony phones. I'd rather waterproofing was a standard feature across all phone vendors (as it is on wristwatches, more or less).
"I've had to suffer an iPhone as my work issued phone for the last 5 months. I hate it. Can't believe people spend their own money when Android is just so much more usable."
Subjective I suppose, down to the individual. With Android I find myself asking "why do I need to do this?" and seeing a cluttered up spaghetti of an OS that continually wants attention. Whereas the iPhone just disappears, almost isn't there. I suppose if you are interested in phones then you might prefer something that requires you to do something with it. I'm not interested in phones and I want the phone to get the hell out of my way so I can just use the apps on it.
They don't want you to be able to remove your battery. It is too hard for them to activate the backdoors when the battery is removed :)
We will see more and more phones with fixed batteries. Especially from those players who wish to sell their products in the USA and UK...
In the case of Samsung phones, the person who stole it. Otherwise it can be tracked with Dive.
A fixed battery is only really bad from the point of view of replacing faulty ones. I could live with that. It's the lack of microSD slot that means I, like so many others present, will be moving to a different manufacturer when the time comes to replace my S4.
While i appreciate I'm in a minority, the reason i bought a s4 was the sd card slot and removable battery. As a work phone, it's so much easier to swap the battery when it is running low than plug in and carry around one of those external packs while I'm trying to speak on the phone and there isn't a handy socket nearby. Similarly, work will only buy me the base storage version as any additional storage costs more and isn't really for work purposes (i have a 64 gb card with music, podcasts, games etc on it).
Quite sad as i don't think there is a flagship Android with a removable battery now.
Nope. Nope nope nope. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check The Answer (42). When asked about The Question, Deep Thought comes up with the Earth and tells the programmers it will take 10 million years to run the program. Unfortunately, things went bad and the Question calculated was "whatdoyougetifyoumultiplysixbynine".
Which works out correct in base13.
"For years UI designers have said that icons are something which are equally meaningless in any language, and have always known that text is better."
So where do all the icons come from and why are they still there?
(My PC desktop and phone screens have lots of icons with no text, I've removed it, because they look better and are easier to 'read'.)
>UI designers have said that icons are something which are equally meaningless in any language
Though I must admit Apple have taken that to new heights.
An icon is supposed to be a clear, easily identifiable symbol.
Remember UI people:
"Flat" means, "I can't distinguish it easily from the background."
"Detailed" means "it takes too long for my brain to recognise which icon I'm looking at."
You can get good icons and you can get bad icons. I've never got on with the icons on washing machines, for example.
For some reason, a large number of my desktop applications all have circular launch icons... so I can't distinguish them by shape; Open Office, Chrome, Picasa, Keyshot, Google Earth...
I need a new cell phone like I need a new computer. This race has been run and I care about the outcome just about as much as I care about the outcome of a marathon. Their all the same in the end and Apple won by an iTunes mile. Blackberry dropped the baton and MSFT kept doing their industrial stuff and were the only ones left around to actually finish the race.
Oh and Apple thought it might be a good idea to make a watch or maybe a car but Jobs couldn't do the Lazarus thing so it was basically over.
Boring...
Bought S5 for water proofing.... watching TV shows while I have a soak without the fear :)
Got no idea what everyone is complaining about the S5 for, most problem free phone I've had, been spot on apart from a little wobble during the lollipop upgrade.
A previous article here suggested that the S6 was going to wipe the floor with the iPhone 6 and reign supreme.
Now that is it here (or shortly will be) it is getting close to the time when this question can be asked and more importantly answered.
Judging from the almost collective gnashing of teeth from the posts so far (no removable battery and no SD card) then it could be more of a Samesung than an iPhone crusher.
Apple really needs a lot of strong competition in the middle to upper price bracket. It could be that this device isn't going to give them the run for their money that they need to keep them on the ball.
{complacency and all that...}
Correct. I'm also still using my S3, thanks to the folk at Cyanogenmod. It's on it's third battery, and still does everything I need it to. In fact it's better than ever, I now have Permission Blocking, AdBlock, Greenify, and absolutely no Samsung bloatware. I have a nice big SD card full of lots of music, it's great.
I rarely go anywhere where there's a 4G signal anyway, so that just isn't important. It could maybe do with more RAM, but I can manage. I'm not planning on upgrading until this one has reached end of life. Sweat the asset!
I guess that Samsung (and the others) have realised that removable batteries (and people like me) were a problem to their sales expectations. But as long as I continue to have a functional phone with a removable battery I'm happy for it to remain their problem, and not mine.
"I guess that Samsung (and the others) have realised that removable batteries (and people like me) were a problem to their sales expectations. But as long as I continue to have a functional phone with a removable battery I'm happy for it to remain their problem, and not mine."
Second battery and second screen for my S3, and this new screen is cracked as well. And less than two years old. I won't be sweating this asset, I'll be ditching it for a different provider at the end of my contract.
You can have my S3 when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I have absolutely no need for a slimmer phone, nor do I want the latest fad. I don't spend my time on it, I spend my time developing on PC.
When 4G is actually available in places I go and worth it, I'll mull over the question of replacing this one. Until then, no battery replacement is a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned.
Having owned every Galaxy S device released I can honestly say the only thing I miss from going to S6 from S5 is the waterproof feature. I've never once had to replace a battery in a phone so the removable battery has never been a selling point for me and after having a memory card die on me a couple of days after returning from holiday I will not use another one. Currently having to rely on internal memory on my phone which means I have very limited space and use TuneInRadio for music.
The new features more than make up for battery/sd card and i'll be getting a 128GB one next month
I have had every version of the Galaxy Note to date + various other Samsung 'phones (inc S3) & tablets.
I rate the Note 4 very highly; I had thought of trying an S6 pending availability of the Note 5, but in the light of the above I will wait for the Note 5. However if the Note 5 doesn't have an SD card slot & removable battery then I won't be buying it.
With all my Notes I have bought a spare battery & charger/case, and rotated two batteries as I am often in situations where one is travelling light, and cannot access a recharging facility for a day or two.
Likewise I want data stored on a removable card which can be backed up, not on a 'phone which can be lost or damaged.
Does Samsung listen to it customers - it seems not.
I have wanted to replace my aging phone for some time now, here are the things keeping me from buying an S6 phone from you:
1) Knox. Void my warranty if you want, but not allowing me to run the OS that came with my phone because I wanted root access is going too far.
2) No SD card, sorry but whatever size storage you may find it in your heart to bestow upon us is never going to be enough, so leave it up to us to choose.
3) No removable battery. Fail, not just because I can't swap it for a new one in a year when the current one is only charging to 85%, but because now I'll have to wait until my battery dies if my phone locks up to be able to use it again. Did you know some people use 2 physical batteries and swap them out when charging is not an option. I guess not.
4) Glass back. Are you freaking kidding me? What's the bezel made out of? Egg shells? How about you make the back out of a material that would let the device survive an accidental drop better and not the stuff they made Cinderella's slippers out of.
5) Curved screen? Who cares. Talk about a solution to a made up problem.
6) Not waterproof? Are you from the past? Because in the past phones weren't waterproof. I thought we were moving forward. Especially since you cannot take out the battery now if it does get wet. Fail.
7) Not giving me a choice of launchers. Fail. Especially since you'll break my phone if I try to change it myself.
8) Root. I want root, would you buy a computer if you didn't know the administrator password? No. Either would I. Just make it part of the EULA "I realize that if I press Root that I can't cry to anyone about anything. Yes/No" I mean is it my phone, or your phone Samsung? If it's your phone then why am I paying for it?
/rant
"4) Glass back. Are you freaking kidding me? What's the bezel made out of? Egg shells? How about you make the back out of a material that would let the device survive an accidental drop better and not the stuff they made Cinderella's slippers out of."
Good idea. Why have such a hard material? Surely it would be better to use something soft that'd be comfortable and cushion the drop. I suggest squirrel fur.
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