The last phablet? 6.4in Samsung Galaxy Note 9 leaves you $1k lighter, needs 'water cooling' Samsung is allegedly mulling ending its Galaxy Note line, now that almost every smartphone on the planet is larger than the original Note – which was so absurdly large at launch it was dubbed the first “phablet." Funnily enough, that first Note, with a mere 5.3in touchscreen, is a minnow by today’s standards: the Galaxy Note 9 …
> ...more likely they're just too bloody expensive.
They are when they launch. However Samsung sell enough of them that they can heavily discount them after around nine months - around the same time as internet rumours about the next model start up.
I bought my S8 for the same price as a OnePlus 5T. The 5T is a decent enough phone, but for the same money I went for the better screen, waterproofing, better support, wider compatibility and wireless charging.
"I bought my S8 for the same price as a OnePlus 5T. The 5T is a decent enough phone, but for the same money I went for the better screen, waterproofing, better support, wider compatibility and wireless charging."
I chose the 5T over the S8 when exactly the same option was before me. I went for the 5T as I have had S3, S4 and S5 and for all of them the support and firmware updates were dire. I get monthly updates on the 5T and that's what matters most to me.
Samsung pushed out monthly updates for July and August for my new S9. Granted, one of the things the August update did was fix the broken VoLTE feature which presumably they broke with the July patch, but at least they're trying... ;-)
I'm hopeful I'll receive future Android security patches - I didn't even get those from LG on my flagship handsets. Total disappointment with them and zero meaningful customer engagement.
I similarly weighed up for a LONG time buying an S8, 5T or S9. The S8 is a great value handset now but I wanted some of the physical design improvements (stereo speakers with decent bass, dual iris back camera and the higher resolution screen than the 5T were what swung it).
The curved edge screen is a pain to apply a good curved TGSP to, so some people might prefer the 5T's screen design although it's only HD not 2K HDR (like the S9).
I royally messed up my first attempt at a Whitestone Dome protector on my S9, and only just about made it acceptable after lots of finessing. Now I need to find a good supplier of more LOCA!
The hardware is great, but they don't support the software for very long...
And this is the part where the community is great, where they support the software for much longer. On xda developers, Samsung flagship phones are one of the few with official lineageOS support.
And this is the part where the community is great, where they support the software for much longer. On xda developers, Samsung flagship phones are one of the few with official lineageOS support.
That's great for muggle end users to try and wrap their minds around or ignore completely... Must be why Oreo is still at 12% after a year, which is pretty shocking. Samsung is doing great damage to Android by muddying the waters with its own apps, own (crap) assistant, own payment system, lots of proprietary stuff, slow updates and hostile approach towards Google all while being the biggest selling vendor and being perceived as Apple's main competitor, not the Pixel. Must make the Alphabet people wince.
Samsung is doing great damage to Android by muddying the waters with its own apps, own (crap) assistant, own payment system, lots of proprietary stuff, slow updates and hostile approach towards Google all while being the biggest selling vendor and being perceived as Apple's main competitor, not the Pixel. Must make the Alphabet people wince.
I've been through the proprietary stuff loop twice now. Only a month ago I was on this forum praising the build and value of an S7 Edge and now I'm back with an iPhone. Upgrading the original Three firmware on the phone to the UK vanilla Oreo version bought with it a whole host of irritating apps that wanted me to sign in and accept terms I wasn't happy with. Including Samsung Pay. And they nagged.
Add to that, when I tried to download the information Samsung have on record for me it came down in an unreadable lump. A support case with them resulted in a "You can download your personal data here" response so I deleted my account.
A real shame as the S7 Edge is a lovely piece of hardware but the last time I looked, Lineage seemed to have dropped it from support so it's Samsung software or another blower.
S8, my first Samsung since feature phone days. Interface is fine - easy to swap softkeys back to Android default, Bixby not hard to disable, some Samsung stuff actually useful. I had been on Nexus before and had been fearing TouchWiz, but Samsung's Android is fine these days. Crazy right?
Received OTA update to Oreo, receiving regular security updates, expect Pie down the line but not fussed about it. Sadly no Project Treble on S8 ( unlike the S9 and the Note 9). Since the the Note 9 has Treble, comments about Samsung's historical update record are irrelevant.
>"Since the the Note 9 has Treble, comments about Samsung's historical update record are irrelevant."
>>That remains to be seen
The historical record is irrelevant regardless of whether Treble works as intended. It's a logic thing. Strewth, I've read here of Sony being rubbish for updates, but my Xperia P was updated through three versions of Android, my Xperia Z3C through at least two: Vendors can - and have - changed and improved over time. So regardless of Treble, past performance isn't a great indicator. Sheeit, at least Samsung will still be in business in a couple of years.
Curious that someone above ditched Samsung for OnePlus over this issue - historically OnePlus have been poor at updates, and recently have only *promised* to be better in future. This suggests that with little to distinguish between handsets these days (I value waterproofing, you might not, you might want wireless charging, I haven't bothered yet), vendors are upping their game and addressing the update issue. Or at least making the right noises.
Oh, you can buy many brands of phone from UK based retailers and be covered by the Sales of Goods Act, but OnePlus insist you buy direct from them, based outside the EU and shipped from Poland. They appear to try hard on customer service but drop the ball. No VAT receipts. Read their forums. But hey, they might grow up and get better in future, so in a coupla of years time when I need a new handset I'll consider them again.
My friend had an Android device with 512GB storage years ago - it was an Archos PMP with a spinning rust HDD in it. Fortunately Android behaves itself now - there was a time it didn't support more than X thousand individual files. This caused him issues cos he filled the HDD with mono MP3s he'd transcribed from vinyl.
I would like to see a tablet with the Snapdragon 845 chip (with decent cooling!!!). At the moment the choice in tablets is between the stupidly overpriced iPad models and Android tablets that have about the same processing power as a mid-range 2016 phone.
How much would it cost to take one of the current Android tablet designs and upgrade it with a current high-end SoC.
With the bigger size of a tablet it should be possible to improve the cooling of the SoC so as to avoid the thermal throttling that occurs in many phones.
I would like to see a tablet with the Snapdragon 845 chip (with decent cooling!!!).
They're already there (not sure about the cooling) - except that they run Windows.
Well, at least the Windows tablets might, one day, possibly, somehow get Linux, while Android tablets with (actual) Linux (with a mainline kernel and uses GNU coreutils instead of busybox) are as rare as ... dunno, rocking horse shit?
You might want to look at the Galaxy S4 Tablet, Snapdragon 845. It has DEX - see recent Reg articles about that - and will act as a second monitor when doing so. DEX optimised software is limited in range, but includes Office 365.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/galaxy-tab-s4-review-a-solid-android-tablet-a-too-quirky-android-desktop/
Really though, Android tablets have always been limited in quality software, since most people who use tablets for more than watching stuff have an iPad - and developers know it. It's too easy to sideload apps onto Android, so developers don't see much return.
It's not just Apple's fault that Android tablets are neglected - Google is working in combining / replacing Android on Tablets with Chrome OS or Fuschia.
> Except it's not 845, it's last year's 835. For $650. They're mad.
Well as I outlined, there's little point in powerful Android tablets when the range of power hungry software (games, productivity apps) is limited. The OSs for productivity on ARM are Chrome OS, iOS (feature complete Photoshop coming soon) and possibly Windows (though i haven't looked recently at what decent productivity Universal Apps are available). Even Google are looking away from Android to Chrome OS for productivity.
As for mad, well yeah, Samsung are asking similar money as Apple do for a 10.5" iPad, give or take (Apple stylus optional extra), yada yada. But it should be telling that no other Android device vendor is bothering much with tablets.
They're already there (not sure about the cooling) - except that they run Windows.
Haha good one...Is that a joke? I think by now we've established that users pale at the idea of Windows on a tablet, (Surfaces aside, [until 2019 at least]) and that an iPad Pro offers things which Windows in that format doesn't, like useful, popular apps populating a vibrant marketplace.
While anecdote isn't the singular of data - it's perfectly understandable that someone won't want to repeat a bad experience. Dixons once screwed me over in the 90s and I have never bought anything from them or their group since. Dixons may not be a bad store, but I'm happy in my decision. YMMV.
Well at least you had the Note 4 with it's designed-to-fail-at-the-end-of-your-phone-contract memory chip rather than the explode-in-your-face Note 7. The exploding Samsung Note 7 seems to have made them a lot more conservative in the Note designs of late, see elaborate cooling solutions, under-specced batteries and underwhelmingly, outdated CPUs. Oh and a stylus that you have to charge. Great, that's real progress then.
This Note 9 announcement is so dull, so underwhelming and soooo incredibly meh, I can't really see how there will be a Note 10 as Samsung just can't be arsed to innovate anymore and I expect their sales to dip again this year.
Hi, is there any way to predict when it is likely to fail?
SO has a lot of data in both internal memory and the 256GB uSD card and it would suck to lose that, though nearly everything is backed up its the main phone and losing it would be a shame.
Also these are known to have OLED burn issues, that I can fix somewhat but still it won't be as bright as original (uses onboard RAM to apply a realtime correction factor to the burned areas)
It starts with occasional massive lag, and random lockups and reboots. From there it's onto failure to boot, and the error message "could not do normal boot, mmc_read failed."
If your Note 4 is still working properly, the best thing you can do (after making sure that everything is fully backed up) is to limit internal storage memory access as much as possible and force everything you possibly can onto the SD card.
If you have started experiencing symptoms, there's a free app on the Play Store called 'Wake Lock - PowerManager'. Install that, set it to Partial Wake Lock and do all you can to avoid having to reboot. That's just putting off the inevitable though, so start shopping for a new phone.
As a coda, I asked the Samsung repair centre in Plymouth for a quote to replace the motherboard in my dead Note 4, and they wanted to charge me £250 for the part alone "because the Note 4 is really popular and so we can."
It's a weighing up of many factors, including what they use the phone for, the clothing they wear, the size of the hands etc etc. Jo Public has gone through a few generations of phone since the first 'Phablets' arrived on the market, and so he has more than enough first-hand information (his previous phones, handling his friend's phones to get an idea of the size etc) to make an informed choice. All design is compromise.
There are two longstanding products I like to equate to smartphones. Playing cards are designed to fit in the hand easily, like an iPhone 4. Postcards are a good size for displaying a more detailed image, like a 5"+ smartphone.
We used to consume our news on a 24" 'screen' that could be stowed in a jacket pocket. As a bonus it could also be used to wrap our chips, swat flies or scrunched up and placed in wet shoes. It was called a newspaper.
Without a fan to get the heat out of the device, what's the point? I guess if the SoC was a hot spot that will distribute the heat more evenly, but the glass in the all glass designs typical today for wireless charging tends to work against letting the heat out.
The overall limit of how much power a cell phone can use isn't going to be affected by this - no one wants a phone that feels hot in their hands, or against their head. Especially not a Galaxy Note, given what happened to the one a couple years ago...
Freakin $1250?!?!?!
A MIFI can cost $40, a SIM only deal for data sufficient for many VOIP calls $10 a month or less, a big screen tablet with a quad core ARM is less than $60, and unlimited calls to all landlines and mobiles is $22 dollars a month from Sipgate. (Yes I'm a cheapskate and proud).
"Significantly, Samsung touted the audio quality of its three-legged companion, rather than its AI smarts."
A company advertising a speaker boats about how good it is as a speaker instead of waffling on about some unrelated bullshit? Yeah, I can see why that would be considered a bad idea, they didn't even mention blockchain once!
Top end smartphones are just too expensive nowadays. I just buy a sim only deal and either a mid range phone (Lenovo P2 was my previous one for £199 with 5000mah battery) or a used previous generation top end phone (LG V20 for £160). The V20 is an interesting prospect. I can swap batteries for use days away from a charger, the DAC is amazing on headphones, a huge screen and it still has infra red for controlling my TV. Yet is was cheap enough that if it fails tomorrow, or if I drop it, lose it on a night out, or whatever, that I can just go and buy something else without worrying too much about it.
When I compare that to a £1000 iphone X or £1250 S9 it's just obvious to me that buying a new top end phone is for poor people. It even sends the message that you care what people think of your phone rather than how you can use money to improve your life. It's nuts.
Also no notch :)
how the hell have the prices of these devices managed to creep up so much? Can we not all agree to have less tech and better prices and less google built-in spywa.. i mean crud?
(Apple fanbois.. you just go ahead. We won't judge you. Honestly!)
Seriously. I like technical growth and advancement, but make it more affordable before unleashing it.
Greediness and willing sheep.
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