Capture the horrors of war in razor-sharp quality with this ruggedised Samsung phone – or just lob it at enemy forces Samsung is aiming a new version of the Galaxy S20 flagship phone at military customers. Dubbed the "Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition", the chaebol describes its latest blower as "mission ready". And it certainly looks the part. The phone is wrapped in a rugged camouflage Juggernaut Case designed to withstand the technological …
Can you imagine soldiers on spec ops using this and at the same time this thing is phoning home to Google, Samsung, Facebook et al with complete GPS coordinates and all conversation logs.
A toast message popping up stating that in order to continue one's mission that the followin EULA must be accepted before pulling the trigger.
The British army used WhatsApp to tell somebody potentially infected with a certain virus everybody is familiar with to stay put at home, and not to come in and spread it around a base.
An advisory was then given to troops that if an officer directly gives you an order and does it via WhatsApp then it is still as binding as if he gives it to you directly in person.
The British military has a long history of using anything that works to pass messages down to carrier pigeons to carry messages, and employing birds of prey to interfere with the opposition doing the same.
The military will have equipment produced by BAE or similar, however the forces have their own names for such suppliers, such as "Billions Above Estimate". Buying a suitable hardened device off the shelf that does something that troops need is possibly a better option to field a device today than getting a defence company like BAE to develop a mobile phone which will arrive in ten years time with a hundredth of the functionality of an off the shelf device at twice the price and about five times the weight.
Doubtful. Anyone on special ops would likely be carrying a rebadged version of the phone, with custom software that's very locked down. It's likely to have been done by one of our existing defence contractors (someone like Thales or BAE), and is likely to have cost the MOD several times what a consumer would pay for essentially the same device.
Not to mention that the word has been around for 40 years, as per wikipedia's article on the word:
The word chaebol derived from the McCune–Reischauer romanization, chaebŏl, of the Korean word jaebeol (재벌, from jae "wealth or property" + beol "faction or clan" – also written with the same Chinese characters 財閥 as Zaibatsu in Japan).[2] The word entered English use in the 1980s.[1]
The wikipeidia article is weird, I think it's broken.
In the 'introduction' of the article, it says 1972 is the first recorded usage of chaebol, but in the actual 'Entymology' section it says the 1980's.
The 1972 date is referenced from merriam-webster dictionary reference [2]), whereas the entymology is from the Oxford dictionary (reference [1]) that doesn't include the date in its reference. So not sure where the author of the wikipedia article got 1980's from, as that date is in neither of the supplied dictionary references. but the 1972 one it.
... and came to the conclusion that it's a standard S20 with a different boot-screen image and a "military grade" case. Which naturally comes with a hefty markup, and lots of accessories which also carry an equally hefty markup.
E.g. the case costs $290, and a "hardened" USB-C cable for it also costs $290.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/the-galaxy-s20-tactical-edition-is-a-shock-and-awe-campaign-against-reality/
To be fair, it does have that funky military design ethos to it; it strongly reminds me of the Fallout Pipboy.
But TBH, I'd probably just pick up a CAT S60. Which may not be cutting edge technology, but they are ridiculously tough. And they have a FLIR camera built in, which means you can do Predator-Vision (tm). Even if the latter feature is probably why they're still relatively expensive, given that people are keen on having the ability to scan people who are running a high temperature atm...
Samsung has so much shovelware, spyware, and spotty updates that this has to be a joke. I've disabled maybe a dozen apps (using a shady 3rd party tool) and the network transfer indicator still never turns off. I've had to swap the SIM card three times to trigger updates after they stopped for nearly a year. There's no unlocking the bootloader on the Snapdragons so you can't install a secure 3rd party OS.
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