Samsung sees 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter::Today, Samsung posted its Q2 2023 financial results. The report says Samsung’s profits have dropped considerably compared to last year.
each new phone is more expensive, with less functionality.
hover on the touch screen? gone
iris scanner, gone
headphone jack? gone
air pressure sensor? gone
humidity sensor? gone
ir blaster, gone
meanwhile I get charged out the ass for storage space.
Why the fuck would I want a newer phone?
Holding tight on to this Samsung Note 9 until it finally dies. Battery is still ‘ok’ for now, will last a full day.
Snapdragon, not that pos Exynos
Finger print reader on the back is the only way to do it. Wife has had several newer models with built in front side fingerprint reader and it has been ridiculously unreliable by comparison.
Iris Scan
Face Scan
Headphone jack
Micro-SD Card
USB-C
Wireless charging
NFC with payment support
And even the stupid pen thingy that I use maybe once a month.
Not 5G but the 4G LTE is usually more than fast enough even for streaming when using as a hotspot.
At least Samsung has proper video out through the USB port. Unlike the trash that Pixels depend on, such as Chromecast. What kind of GPU doesn’t have either HDMI or displayport (through USB-C like Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Steamdeck, laptops, etc. ) out in this day and age?
Mine is actually very easily removable. The device overheats so much, that it’s completely annihilated the glue, and now the back panel is only held down by the case c:
Pointless unintuitive feature that’s replaced with simple press and hold.
Unintuitive for you, perhaps. I found it more intuitive than the press and hold (until it became ubiquitous), since it made more sense for a preview. Press and hold, in my mind, is more for secondary menus and alternative options, like mass-selecting.
The air gestures were also nice if I had my hands full, since they worked without turning the screen on, and without touching it, although they leaned more heavily on the gimmick side of things.
Slow and unreliable compared to fingerprints. Anyone actually used it?
Yes. I use it a lot when I have my phone on a stand, or when I have gloves on. Fingerprint readers don’t work through gloves, for obvious reasons, and it’s less effort than having to fumble around with my phone and my gloves, especially when I will be putting the glove back on afterwards.
Since my phone also has the fingerprint reader on the back, rather than the front, it also makes it much easier to unlock my phone without picking it up, which is nice when it’s on its wireless charging pad, or I want to quickly check a notification or something, rather than needing to pick it up.
As for speed, I’ve not found it that much worse than the fingerprint, especially once the camera’s fired up. The hard part tends to be aligning yourself just right, and that you need to tap a “confirm” button compared to the one-click that fingerprint does.
Who needs these things? Weather apps work just fine. Rather use the space for battery.
The space won’t be used for battery. It’s a small chip on the PCB, and Samsung would either keep it around for other sensors, or would leave that space blank. Having a tiny battery protrusion like that is silly anyway. Having a little dingle like that would just make the battery more likely to be damaged and erupt into a violent conflagration.
I personally found it handy, even if it was underutilised. Sometimes you want information from within the house, not outside of it, and if your phone can fetch that information and present it, you don’t need to go and buy a separate hygrometer and air pressure sensor, and carry it around, or have to feed that information via an external service.
Unless you’re looking to vandalize public tvs, just replace it with any number of wifi/bluetooth remotes.
Assuming that your TV comes with support for those. If it doesn’t, such as if it’s an older television, then you would be out of luck.
Personally, I used mine a bunch back in the day, just because it was nice to be able to fire up the VCR, Amplifier, and TV all in one button, rather than a bundle of loose remotes, but that’s more of a first world problem, and less of an issue these days, since television is on the decline.
More importantly, though, the phones aren’t cheaper despite the loss of these features. The phones just get more expensive, even though they had fewer sensors and features like that.
The point is that technology isn’t supposed to get in the way of us doing things and that’s exactly what removing features that are useful to people does.
Usually there is a compromise somewhere though. If they could just add all the features without any downsides, they surely would (and demand a premium for it). Granted, sometimes it is just cheaper to get rid of it (and thus make more profit), but sometimes its just a decision to cater to a minority or provide a benefit for the majority of users.
Counterpoint: phones like Redmi 9T have it all. Headphone jack, expandable storage, IR blaster, NFC… Also manages to have an “okay” battery capacity that’s 6Ah.
The only problem is it costs too little so people don’t consider it.
First, even for Xiaomi that phone is crap with a myriad of software related complaints alone. On the hardware front its cheap because cheap in gets cheap out. Underpowered even for 2021.
Don’t forget the SD card slot missing, S20 was the last one that had it. I still don’t know what to get after that, just because of the missing SD.
Internal storage on phones is over 200gb by now. I havent needed an SD for years. What the fuck do you store on your phone that could still need an SD? lmao
Record 1 minute video, how big is that file? 200 MB, 0.2 GB. 5 minutes and 1 GB is full. When something interesting happens, 5 minutes are recorded easy, obviously. 200 GB, nothing for apps, maps, downloads,… are enough to record 15 hours of video. Then that is it. How many moments can I capture with that? Enough for maybe 2 years? I don’t throw my memories away when I get a new phone. Instead, I just buy a new SD every few years and compress the video files every once in a while.
I have a young son and it was getting very irritating having to be selective recording my videos of him. I finally just paid $90 and added a 1TB premium sd card, and now I won’t have to worry about it at all & download all the videos I want for us.
Upgrading the internal storage to 1TB on a new phone costs several hundred dollars.
Wait air pressure sensor and humidity sensor? Are you talking about their watches?
Samsung Note 10 and others have a barometric sensor, though I’m not aware of any app using them. Which might explain their removal, sadly.
