Samsung's mobile chief gets shunted aside for software guy Samsung Electronics has replaced the head of its mobile business, who has been in post for the past six years. Shin Jong-Kyun will be retained as a "co-chief executive" of the giant, which spans semiconductors and displays, white goods such as fridges, cookers and vacuum cleaners, home electronics such as TVs, and smartphones …
So they decided to get greedy and it's blown up in their faces.
Non-removable battery, no SD slot, extortionate prices for on-board storage?
They thought they could copy Apple and it failed. Fire sale now in progress on the S6 models.
So, basically go back to where you were and put the SD slot and removable battery on the S7 and revise the Note 5 to at least have an SD slot and release it in the UK.
Thank you!
"So, basically go back to where you were and put the SD slot and removable battery on the S7"
I would be happy without the extra Samsung bloatware they install too or their annoying Samsung Apps, which seems to notify me every second day.
I have an S3 which is due for replacement but I won't go a Samsung this time, all I want is external storage and vanilla Android.Marshmallow.
I'm sick of Samsung promising future OS upgrades that never eventuate, they've done this with the S3 and my tablet, hence why I want vanilla Android.
Mobile: Samsung, premium brand pricing, but not premium brand speed on providing patches for various android bugs, option of updates to new version of Android.
.. and move to (in many models) lack of removable battery and / or SD card, alienates a lot of people, again with premium price / branding I expect such features.
Samsung idea of premium mainly seems to be adding lots of unnecessary tweaks / apps on top of android but *not* promptly providing patches to address security holes.
I cannot be alone in thinking that premium would be vanilla android (fast, storage space not cluttered with unwanted vendor junk, easily patched / upgraded) with user replaceable battery, SD card slot & ideally dual SIM.
Google are obsessed about releasing Nexus models without SC card, so a decent vanilla android phone is big market gap for anyone who wants to have happy customers - & let's face it, vanilla android also means less costs for a phone vendor.
"vanilla android also means less costs for a phone vendor."
Yeah, but it also means less profit. They include those particular apps to drive folks to their other products, or a partner's product and make money from that. In other cases, they'll make modifications so that people associate the brand with more than the writing above the screen; Its hard to establish brand loyalty when there is no discernible difference between your brand and a cheap phone from a competitor like Huwai.
As for patches, that is the problem with the TelCo, not the phone manufacturer. The TelCo will customize the phone even further, making it nearly impossible for the handset manufacturer from making a proper patch available, so they'll make the source changes, send the diffs down to the TelCo and let them merge and compile the patch to be sent out. But even then, the TelCo will drag its heels as much as possible when it comes to patching bugs that don't prevent the phone from connecting to their network and generating billable activity, especially since patching the phone may cause the phone to fail (Which means both lost revenue while the phone doesn't work, plus the cost of a warranty repair as they were the ones that broke it). Plus, how else are they going to convince someone to upgrade ("We can update your old, obsolete phone to fix its bugs, or you can buy this shiny new phone with better battery life and better reliability for only $20 a month!")
Vanilla Android also means no product differentiation, and no ability to get a piece of the ongoing revenue streams that Google is collecting from Android.
If vanilla Android proved popular to the masses, Xiaomi or Huawei would introduce a phone with like specs costing a third of what Samsung sells its premium phones for running vanilla Android and then Samsung is really screwed.
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