Hold on tight, we are almost back...
Previously on Lemmy: Sony
Past Discussions:
I thought we should restart the brand discussion with something more popular to give this community relaunch a bit more oomph. So, Samsung it is.
I've never really used a Samsung phone much before, despite them being so popular in the States. Have friends who used them, they usually look nice and high quality, and the Galaxy S Active are the only high-end phones I know that doesn't shatter when you look at them wrong without a case, so, props to Samsung.
There are may reasons I don't like Samsung phones: Hardware fuse disabling Knox on bootloader unlock, Exynos vs Snapdragon models, the mandatory Bixby button, the Galaxy Note 7 that really blew up. To me, Samsung phones are trying so hard to go against what makes Android good, which is the customizability to do whatever you wanted. Android is everything; Samsung is just Samsung.
Personally, I think Samsung is only worth buying at the very high end for the Galaxy S series. I've heard that A series have gotten better, but there always seems to be better choices from Moto/Pixel/Chinese brands on Amazon that it's not worth considering their low tier offering.
What should we do next week? I'm thinking Microsoft, just to make fun of them for the very idea of making a Surface Duo 2.
FAQ:
Re. the Mag-Stripe. Bare in mind the US is <10% of the market for the Samsung phones. And then you'd need to break down of the Samsung phones sold in North America - how many of those were S-series vs. the others which don't support the mag-stripe. Even if 50-50, that's now <5% of phones which have mag-stripe support in a country that uses it. Then rough guess of 20% of users actually pay by phone? You're now <1%. A small pale blue dot in the vast cosmic arena...
SD cards - there's also the point of user data security. Data stored on an SD card can't be easily guarenteed safe by Knox. Yes, you can encrypt it, but remove that SD card and the card itself can't protect the data from brute forcing encyption keys.