Technology Android

[masta247]

Are people just focused on being amazed by how the M1 performs, despite it lagging far behind the 3950? Or do they still understand that a power user will still prefer to get their job done on the most power machine instead of buying an M1 and just sitting there impressed that it runs at a fraction of the speed of what the user could be running on a more power Ryzen chip?

Yeah the enthusiasts know well the M1 is not in any way comparable to desktop powerhouses. It's more about how impressive it is that Apple made an ARM chip that can outperform Intel's laptop chips in many typical workloads that you usually use laptops for. I hope most people understand that Apple isn't suddenly king of CPUs. They just made a very solid alternative to Intel that makes a lot of sense in Macbooks that seemingly came out of nowhere. They definitely deserve props. If you use your Macbook to browse the web, watch videos, edit photos and do just general everyday stuff with it, the M1 is suddenly amongst the top chips for that, and that's really impressive.

 

[dilla]

Yeah the enthusiasts know well the M1 is not in any way comparable to desktop powerhouses. It's more about how impressive it is that Apple made an ARM chip that can outperform Intel's laptop chips in many typical workloads that you usually use laptops for. I hope most people understand that Apple isn't suddenly king of CPUs. They just made a very solid alternative to Intel that makes a lot of sense in Macbooks that seemingly came out of nowhere. They definitely deserve props. If you use your Macbook to browse the web, watch videos, edit photos and do just general everyday stuff with it, the M1 is suddenly amongst the top chips for that, and that's really impressive.

What do you think Apple does with its "Pro" machines like the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro? Do they get the Apple Silicon treatment or does Apple recognize that AS has its limitations the more heavier the use goes? If you said that the M1 is great for tasks most people do on a laptop, does that mean the 16" MBPs that get the M1 or M2 later on will actually be a step down in performance from the Intel MBPs for the people who do use their 16" MBPs for video editing and other creative things?

 

[dilla]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-smartphone-idUSKBN28B3U5

I felt the S and Note line were getting pretty close to each other anyway. It was just the pen or marginally larger screen. Otherwise, I felt the Note was an excuse to have two launch cycles within a year, like OnePlus does, where the S had one chipset and the Note came out around the time the next gen of chipsets were readily available.

But the "Plus" and "Ultra" monikers sort of made the lineup saturated, much like what Apple has done with the iPhone 12, Mini, Pro, Pro Max, SE, XR, etc.

Reuters says it's because of the pandemic but I think that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. The S and Note were starting to get too similar, at least to be considered two separate lines of phones with two spread-out release dates.

Revisiting the M1 discussion, the M1 runs Windows 10 "better" or faster than the Surface Pro X. It sounds more like a piece of trivia, just to dunk on other OEMs, especially MS because I can't imagine too many people trying to run Windows on their Mac, aside from gaming. Only morons do that. Morons like me. But it's still interesting to see how the rest of the industry reacts to the M1. Give Apple enough time and they can convince us average users at the next Keynote using pretty graphs showing 100%+ increases in performance and battery life over the competitors and it may give Apple the leg-up if PC OEMs start to get on board with ARM on a scale similar to Apple's. It may be true but that just kills the industry and gives Apple the marketshare, much like the iPad. Which is a great piece of tech but that's almost the de-facto device people think of when they think tablets and other OEMs just gave half-assed attempts at a tablet before eventually bowing out.

 

[dilla]

https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/07/samsung-ditch-power-adapters-after-mocking-apple/

 

[masta247]

Revisiting the M1 discussion, the M1 runs Windows 10 "better" or faster than the Surface Pro X. It sounds more like a piece of trivia, just to dunk on other OEMs, especially MS because I can't imagine too many people trying to run Windows on their Mac, aside from gaming.

Which should come at 0 surprise. The Surface Pro X is running a Qualcomm ARM chip almost identical to what the Galaxy S10 had that's anything ranging from a joke to unusable for anything requiring more power than a 2-year old phone can offer, running an operating system that "supports" ARM chips only for the lols. The top user review says "Avoid at all Costs", and I'm surprised the Surface X is a commercial product, no matter how niche it is. It's not a device you can seriously do pretty much anything on except to edit a PowerPoint or check your e-mails, assuming you're not in a hurry and using Outlook to do so as I think it's the only e-mail client that works natively.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/07/samsung-ditch-power-adapters-after-mocking-apple/

Samsung always does that. Same story with removable batteries, headphone jacks and I don't even remember what else. Their marketing isn't looking too far ahead at all, which shouldn't come as a surprise since they often don't get information about their own upcoming products until they're finished and ready to be prepped for a launch. They're trying to be very ballsy considering those circumstances though.

 

[dilla]

Which should come at 0 surprise. The Surface Pro X is running a Qualcomm ARM chip almost identical to what the Galaxy S10 had that's anything ranging from a joke to unusable for anything requiring more power than a 2-year old phone can offer, running an operating system that "supports" ARM chips only for the lols. The top user review says "Avoid at all Costs", and I'm surprised the Surface X is a commercial product, no matter how niche it is. It's not a device you can seriously do pretty much anything on except to edit a PowerPoint or check your e-mails, assuming you're not in a hurry and using Outlook to do so as I think it's the only e-mail client that works natively.



Samsung always does that. Same story with removable batteries, headphone jacks and I don't even remember what else. Their marketing isn't looking too far ahead at all, which shouldn't come as a surprise since they often don't get information about their own upcoming products until they're finished and ready to be prepped for a launch. They're trying to be very ballsy considering those circumstances though.

Yeah Samsung has been copy-catting a lot of stuff from Apple, good and bad. As Samsung has been condensing their lineup by removing the Note line (supposedly) and just making phones more expensive and having weird tiers (the Ultra), Apple has been expanding quite a bit. I'm not sure if it's a good thing since the specs do vary a good bit, even if only techies would be the only ones to know that, there's still an iPhone at almost every price point and all the phones still enjoy most, if not all, of the new features that come out for the latest iOS.

I read something that said the Galaxy S21 will have an S Pen. The S Pen looks pretty cool and does some real cool stuff but for some reason that hasn't seemed to taken off outside of people that love the Note lineup. I don't know how much Samsung marketed the feature but no one talks about it as a must-have feature. A stylus on phone may not be for everyone but you'd think it would still be something people would want on their phones, be it an iPhone or a Samsung or LG phone.
My phone is paid off in May next year and the iPhone 13 is rumored to get a 90 or 120hz screen, finally. Even if it's only marginally better than the 12, I think I'll upgrade to that.

 

[dilla]

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/18/a14-compared-to-snapdragon-888-benchmarks/

I think the A13 outperforms this as well. I get mixed up on which iOS devices have which chipset, including iPads and such.

I know benchmarks aren't everything but even in real-world usage, this has to translate in to better performance, right? Or a more efficient phone that wouldn't burn through battery at the same rate?

 

[masta247]

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/18/a14-compared-to-snapdragon-888-benchmarks/

I think the A13 outperforms this as well. I get mixed up on which iOS devices have which chipset, including iPads and such.

I know benchmarks aren't everything but even in real-world usage, this has to translate in to better performance, right? Or a more efficient phone that wouldn't burn through battery at the same rate?

Qualcomm chips haven't been close to any of the Apple chips for many years now. I wouldn't read macrumors for news about a Qualcomm chip, but the 888 is a huge gain for Qualcomm, and actually quite surprisingly puts them not as far behind Apple's latest and greatest as expected. On the CPU-side it's largely because they are using a new ultra high performance core to boost their single threaded performance. People looking at these chips won't be too concerned about comparing them against Apple's since they are in a different ecosystem and are close enough to Apple's that there'll be little reason to switch to an iPhone for the CPU performance alone too. So what matters here is that the 888 will deliver a solid performance improvement on the Android camp.

But what's even more interesting lies outside of the CPU - the Snapdragon 888 appears to be a very solid upgrade in all areas and really gets a lot of things right that the 865 couldn't. It's coming with a much improved, integrated 5G modem which Apple won't have for years (relying on Qualcomm's last-gen external modem instead), and delivers a further gigantic improvement to what was already the best DSP for superior image processing (it's literally four times as fast in image compute, which is a big deal). The GPU performance leap is pretty big too landing not far off from Apple's.

So far from the information we've got it looks like a great all-around chip, depending on power consumption numbers which we haven't gotten yet. Surely Apple's A14 not being much of an improvement over the A13 helped, but the fact Qualcomm are literally within 15-30% of Apple's latest chipset in performance while still offering better value-adds is something that hasn't happened since ~2013.

 

[dilla]

Qualcomm chips haven't been close to any of the Apple chips for many years now. I wouldn't read macrumors for news about a Qualcomm chip, but the 888 is a huge gain for Qualcomm, and actually quite surprisingly puts them not as far behind Apple's latest and greatest as expected. On the CPU-side it's largely because they are using a new ultra high performance core to boost their single threaded performance. People looking at these chips won't be too concerned about comparing them against Apple's since they are in a different ecosystem and are close enough to Apple's that there'll be little reason to switch to an iPhone for the CPU performance alone too. So what matters here is that the 888 will deliver a solid performance improvement on the Android camp.

But what's even more interesting lies outside of the CPU - the Snapdragon 888 appears to be a very solid upgrade in all areas and really gets a lot of things right that the 865 couldn't. It's coming with a much improved, integrated 5G modem which Apple won't have for years (relying on Qualcomm's last-gen external modem instead), and delivers a further gigantic improvement to what was already the best DSP for superior image processing (it's literally four times as fast in image compute, which is a big deal). The GPU performance leap is pretty big too landing not far off from Apple's.

So far from the information we've got it looks like a great all-around chip, depending on power consumption numbers which we haven't gotten yet. Surely Apple's A14 not being much of an improvement over the A13 helped, but the fact Qualcomm are literally within 15-30% of Apple's latest chipset in performance while still offering better value-adds is something that hasn't happened since ~2013.

So QC got their shit together for the 888, it sounds like. The one issue in their last flagship chip, the one in the S20, was that the 5G modem was always active, even if there wasn't 5G around, right? Have they done something about that in the 888? I know that was a big draw on battery for those with the 5G variants.

Also, it's crazy how fast the year flew by as we're already getting close to the rumored release of the S21. I think the rumors says January 14th, or so? Not looking forward to that price structure, though.

Also, the Readers Choice Phone of they year on Android Police was the Pixel 5 lol.

 

[masta247]

So QC got their shit together for the 888, it sounds like. The one issue in their last flagship chip, the one in the S20, was that the 5G modem was always active, even if there wasn't 5G around, right? Have they done something about that in the 888? I know that was a big draw on battery for those with the 5G variants.

Yes, having the 5G modem integrated into the chipset this time should completely solve this. You don't need to power a separate chip, everything is in one that can dynamically adjust power depending on needs of its different areas. This also means significantly lower cost (unless Qualcomm gets even more greedy) since they are only buying one chip instead of two and there's no need to engineer both into the board, and allows for phone makers to save some space.

All in all theoretically this could lead to somewhat less expensive flagships, even if just by a bit. Memory prices have also hit rock bottom - OEMs can get 2TBs of solid state storage memory for ~$100 lol. It also applies to RAM which is pretty much half of what memory cost when the S20 launched. Of course they aren't going to transfer all their savings onto their end customers, but they definitely have space to do so to some extent, or at the very least no reason to further raise prices other than just because people are willing to pay unreasonable amounts for electronics during lockdowns.

Also, it's crazy how fast the year flew by as we're already getting close to the rumored release of the S21. I think the rumors says January 14th, or so? Not looking forward to that price structure, though.

Also, the Readers Choice Phone of they year on Android Police was the Pixel 5 lol.

American Android sites are still fanboying for the Pixel phones. I think at this point we can all agree that the Pixel 5 isn't a great phone. You could make some good points for the 4a mostly around its value, but not so much for 5.

As for the Galaxy S21, my hopes aren't too high. It still looks like the S20 with a different back and I'm yet to hear about any major innovation that they're prepping for it. We know it may have the Snapdragon 888 and it may be a better phone all-around this time around depending on where they go with the camera set-up, pricing etc. We will see, but I'm not going to hold my breath simply because of how disappointed I was with Samsung's recent launches.

 

[dilla]

Yes, having the 5G modem integrated into the chipset this time should completely solve this. You don't need to power a separate chip, everything is in one that can dynamically adjust power depending on needs of its different areas. This also means significantly lower cost (unless Qualcomm gets even more greedy) since they are only buying one chip instead of two and there's no need to engineer both into the board, and allows for phone makers to save some space.

All in all theoretically this could lead to somewhat less expensive flagships, even if just by a bit. Memory prices have also hit rock bottom - OEMs can get 2TBs of solid state storage memory for ~$100 lol. It also applies to RAM which is pretty much half of what memory cost when the S20 launched. Of course they aren't going to transfer all their savings onto their end customers, but they definitely have space to do so to some extent, or at the very least no reason to further raise prices other than just because people are willing to pay unreasonable amounts for electronics during lockdowns.



American Android sites are still fanboying for the Pixel phones. I think at this point we can all agree that the Pixel 5 isn't a great phone. You could make some good points for the 4a mostly around its value, but not so much for 5.

As for the Galaxy S21, my hopes aren't too high. It still looks like the S20 with a different back and I'm yet to hear about any major innovation that they're prepping for it. We know it may have the Snapdragon 888 and it may be a better phone all-around this time around depending on where they go with the camera set-up, pricing etc. We will see, but I'm not going to hold my breath simply because of how disappointed I was with Samsung's recent launches.

Yeah, anyone looking at a Samsung phone is better off waiting at least 3-6 months when prices drop like a rock. Had I waited another month or two last year in getting my S10+, I could have saved another ~$200.

I'd be shocked if Samsung even drops the price of their lineup by even $100. Should they? Well, the iPhone 12 Mini is $700, or about $200 less than what the S21 will probably be. And while they're not in the same tier of phones when it comes to size, the rest of the iPhone 12 lineup is priced proportionately to that.

I wonder who the next OEM is to become the next big player as Android's big-hitter. Samsung has been in decline for x-amount of years now. LG and Moto are treading water, if not already drowning. Google is meh as an OEM. Those are all the mainstream OEMs for Android for you. After that, it's the Chinese OEMs, which are huge outside the US, and that's it. Is OnePlus still seen the same way as its OP2 "Flagship Killer" days back in 2014 or so? I think even they got big and stopped being as consumer-friendly as they used to be.

 

[masta247]

Yeah, anyone looking at a Samsung phone is better off waiting at least 3-6 months when prices drop like a rock. Had I waited another month or two last year in getting my S10+, I could have saved another ~$200.

I'd be shocked if Samsung even drops the price of their lineup by even $100. Should they? Well, the iPhone 12 Mini is $700, or about $200 less than what the S21 will probably be. And while they're not in the same tier of phones when it comes to size, the rest of the iPhone 12 lineup is priced proportionately to that.

I wonder who the next OEM is to become the next big player as Android's big-hitter. Samsung has been in decline for x-amount of years now. LG and Moto are treading water, if not already drowning. Google is meh as an OEM. Those are all the mainstream OEMs for Android for you. After that, it's the Chinese OEMs, which are huge outside the US, and that's it. Is OnePlus still seen the same way as its OP2 "Flagship Killer" days back in 2014 or so? I think even they got big and stopped being as consumer-friendly as they used to be.

OnePlus has higher margins than Samsung at this point since they are 100% Chinese, except they buy chips from Qualcomm and some displays and memory chips from Samsung/Korea. Their phones are designed and manufactured in China though, which comes with the cheapest labor and misc parts out of any flagship brands. OnePlus phones just aren't that popular outside of North America though, just as is the case with the Pixel phones which also come with very high margins.

I think Samsung could drop their prices on the S21 series by at least $50 and it'd do them a lot of good. We will see how they decide to go about it, my faith in their decision-making abilities around their recent product launches is not high, but the market situation is very favorable to them now, which is likely why they are pushing the launch of the S21 to come earlier than usual. It's either because they know they can offer a better product for less, or because they think they can try to make more money.

Samsung phones very quickly drop in value right after the next gen launches and the best deals on Samsung phones begin around 15 months after launch, where they start selling for literally half of their launch price. It might sound like a long time, but it isn't - I bet you'll be able to get a new or at least open box S20 by next summer for less than $600. Since phones change so little and last much longer these days, and Samsung promised to support their phones for three years with updates now, I think that's a very good time to upgrade.

 

[dilla]

OnePlus has higher margins than Samsung at this point since they are 100% Chinese, except they buy chips from Qualcomm and some displays and memory chips from Samsung/Korea. Their phones are designed and manufactured in China though, which comes with the cheapest labor and misc parts out of any flagship brands. OnePlus phones just aren't that popular outside of North America though, just as is the case with the Pixel phones which also come with very high margins.

I think Samsung could drop their prices on the S21 series by at least $50 and it'd do them a lot of good. We will see how they decide to go about it, my faith in their decision-making abilities around their recent product launches is not high, but the market situation is very favorable to them now, which is likely why they are pushing the launch of the S21 to come earlier than usual. It's either because they know they can offer a better product for less, or because they think they can try to make more money.

Samsung phones very quickly drop in value right after the next gen launches and the best deals on Samsung phones begin around 15 months after launch, where they start selling for literally half of their launch price. It might sound like a long time, but it isn't - I bet you'll be able to get a new or at least open box S20 by next summer for less than $600. Since phones change so little and last much longer these days, and Samsung promised to support their phones for three years with updates now, I think that's a very good time to upgrade.

I agree. I'm slowly starting to get away from the idea that I have to have the latest and greatest when it comes to phones for the same reason you stated; that they just don't change enough year over year, or longer. A 5G capable phone would be nice but that's only if I get 5G in most of the areas that I'm in. But seeing 5G capable phones from either Samsung or, more recently, Apple, doesn't give me FOMO. Faster speeds are always nice but that's the biggest thing going for the latest phones, after a high-refresh-rate screen. And even that doesn't entice me enough to upgrade.

Remember about 5+ years ago, we bemoaned the lack of big, new features in Android being announced? I think Apple is having its moment the past few years since then by announcing a few, big features in each iteration of iOS. The hardware improvements for the iPhone still feel like the same magnitude as the ones Samsung and other OEMs are doing, where it's not too big of a deal, but still neat. But nothing that's going to have you breaking down doors to get it ASAP. But what Apple has done with iOS to finally tie the community of all or most of its devices together is pretty unique and well-done, and that makes me want to jump ship. Sure, the A14 kicks ass but that's why I asked about real world performance and its benefits, and I'm not sure we'd notice those unless we were heavy users. Like we played demanding games on our mobile devices and noticed a difference between an S20 and iPhone 12 and how games played on them. But I do like how Apple's health is all tied in together across most Apple devices. I also like how good Keychain is and how well Apple devices communicate with each other. No other OEM has managed to replicate that. I took my iPad to work today instead of my MBP and this was my first time taking the iPad in to this clinic. I was about to ask for the WiFi password again but my iPad had already automatically connected because of Keychain. My colleague only had to enter it once on her Mac before her iPhone also automatically connected as well. And that's just one, small feature that shows off how well-integrated the Apple ecosystem is. I'm not sure the same would've happened if I had my S10+ and then owned an Android tablet and used it today in the same situation. I also don't know of anyone that has an Android tablet I could try it out on lol.

You think $50 will make a difference for Samsung, though? Or for customers, I should say? I think if given an S21 and an iPhone 12, people would pay $100 more for the iPhone. Not everyone, but just Average Joes that are due for an upgrade, I think the Apple brand carries more weight, at least in the US. Samsung is going to have to undercut a comparable iPhone by $150 or more, or people will just pay more for the iPhone to keep up appearances.

We'll see. I'm curious just as you are to see what Samsung does this time around. The hardware might be more powerful than last generation, but if people don't care as much, Samsung is going to have to introduce something on the software side, similar to what Apple has been doing with iOS over the past few years. And seeing as how Samsung is slowly shutting down apps and services of its own, it gives me the same vibes as what Google is doing. Realizing that whatever Apple did within its walled-garden is paying off many years later. Most recently, Samsung is killing Samsung Pay Rewards. It was great in the beginning but now it's just a shell of its former self and I'm not sure many people will use Samsung Pay if there aren't rewards associated with it. Even if Samsung Pay is much more convenient and accepted in more places than Google/Apple Pay.

That's what Samsung is up against, and I don't know if they can afford another year of a mediocre release with the S21 as they did with the S20

 

[dilla]

https://www.gizchina.com/2020/12/20...-apple-galaxy-s21-will-lack-same-accessories/

Just gonna leave that here lol

 

[masta247]

You think $50 will make a difference for Samsung, though? Or for customers, I should say? I think if given an S21 and an iPhone 12, people would pay $100 more for the iPhone. Not everyone, but just Average Joes that are due for an upgrade, I think the Apple brand carries more weight, at least in the US. Samsung is going to have to undercut a comparable iPhone by $150 or more, or people will just pay more for the iPhone to keep up appearances.

I think at this point there aren't as many people moving between iOS and Android, as none of them have killer features big enough to make it worth the hassle at this point - they're more similar than they ever were. I noticed that over the last two or three years ever since Apple added things that Android phones only had and Android became as user-friendly and "just working" out of the box the way iOS was people are sticking to the ecosystem that they're invested in.
Even for me, it would be painful to drop not only Android where I paid for most of my apps, but also Samsung as I'm quite invested in their value adds. I use Samsung Pay, the Galaxy Buds which I really like (which work best with Samsung phones) and am used to and like their UI and the added functionality of their skins.
I think Pay and the Buds are genuinely better than what Apple has. Even if their Airpods objectively aren't necessarily worse, just different, Apple Pay just isn't as good and they'd require me to make a lot of changes and some additional purchases to try to match what I already have and like with Samsung. Recreating the same experience with an iPhone would take a lot of time, money and in some cases I wouldn't be able to fill all the gaps.

So I think Samsung is mostly about attracting upgraders from within the Android ecosystem, they just need a new appealing phone at a good enough price to attract people, and slashing prices even by $50 sends a message that it's a better deal than the S20 was at least, especially if the S21 (or S30, depending on what they end up calling it) is a better phone all-around. If they ditch the charger and headphones, there is a great opportunity to slash prices even further though, which would be great for them. I already have 4 fast chargers at home that I don't even use and two pairs of their AKG headphones that I got with the S8 and S10, of which I only use one since they're good for Zoom calls. After upgrading to a phone without a headphone jack I don't imagine ever using them anymore anyway.

Their fast charger and the AKG headphones aren't exactly cheap - together they easily account for at least an additional $50 on their end. If they don't transfer all those huge savings onto its customers, Samsung will further bleed users - that said between the above and savings on parts they have a shot to bring back some excitement precisely by slashing prices on the S21 at launch. Otherwise it'll be another good phone to buy only after the S22 (or whatever they call it) launches.

As for 5G, the biggest factor that doesn't make it exciting for me is how good 4G/LTE is. Not only the speeds, but the infrastructure investments and modem improvements making it as dense and trouble-free as it is today. 5G will take a long time to reach the same level of maturity, and it doesn't offer enough in terms of needed improvements to me as a user want to jump to it in the sorry state it's still in. You can actually say that it's the best time to use a 4G phone as the infrastructure is very mature and the speeds are more than almost anyone would need on their phones. As a matter of fact, the biggest difference you would notice with 5G as a user is how often you're dropped to a lower standard compared to a solid and stable LTE you get pretty much anywhere there's any radio signal. Since I wouldn't even tell the speed improvement that 5G provides while on it (unless you stream 8K video on your phone or something) at the moment I see 5G as a net negative.

To be honest 5G is mainly appealing to the carriers as it allows for more users to be serviced with less/cheaper equipment, not so much to the end users at the moment. Phone manufacturers are also happy as they have a larger number on their spec sheet to try to bait people into paying for. It will be more appealing to the end users only once the infrastructure matures and 5G inevitably means more and cheaper data, which isn't the case at the moment as we're still essentially paying extra to cover the big deployment expenses, and we're not getting the final product worth paying for yet.

 

[dilla]

I think at this point there aren't as many people moving between iOS and Android, as none of them have killer features big enough to make it worth the hassle at this point - they're more similar than they ever were. I noticed that over the last two or three years ever since Apple added things that Android phones only had and Android became as user-friendly and "just working" out of the box the way iOS was people are sticking to the ecosystem that they're invested in.
Even for me, it would be painful to drop not only Android where I paid for most of my apps, but also Samsung as I'm quite invested in their value adds. I use Samsung Pay, the Galaxy Buds which I really like (which work best with Samsung phones) and am used to and like their UI and the added functionality of their skins.
I think Pay and the Buds are genuinely better than what Apple has. Even if their Airpods objectively aren't necessarily worse, just different, Apple Pay just isn't as good and they'd require me to make a lot of changes and some additional purchases to try to match what I already have and like with Samsung. Recreating the same experience with an iPhone would take a lot of time, money and in some cases I wouldn't be able to fill all the gaps.

So I think Samsung is mostly about attracting upgraders from within the Android ecosystem, they just need a new appealing phone at a good enough price to attract people, and slashing prices even by $50 sends a message that it's a better deal than the S20 was at least, especially if the S21 (or S30, depending on what they end up calling it) is a better phone all-around. If they ditch the charger and headphones, there is a great opportunity to slash prices even further though, which would be great for them. I already have 4 fast chargers at home that I don't even use and two pairs of their AKG headphones that I got with the S8 and S10, of which I only use one since they're good for Zoom calls. After upgrading to a phone without a headphone jack I don't imagine ever using them anymore anyway.

Their fast charger and the AKG headphones aren't exactly cheap - together they easily account for at least an additional $50 on their end. If they don't transfer all those huge savings onto its customers, Samsung will further bleed users - that said between the above and savings on parts they have a shot to bring back some excitement precisely by slashing prices on the S21 at launch. Otherwise it'll be another good phone to buy only after the S22 (or whatever they call it) launches.

As for 5G, the biggest factor that doesn't make it exciting for me is how good 4G/LTE is. Not only the speeds, but the infrastructure investments and modem improvements making it as dense and trouble-free as it is today. 5G will take a long time to reach the same level of maturity, and it doesn't offer enough in terms of needed improvements to me as a user want to jump to it in the sorry state it's still in. You can actually say that it's the best time to use a 4G phone as the infrastructure is very mature and the speeds are more than almost anyone would need on their phones. As a matter of fact, the biggest difference you would notice with 5G as a user is how often you're dropped to a lower standard compared to a solid and stable LTE you get pretty much anywhere there's any radio signal. Since I wouldn't even tell the speed improvement that 5G provides while on it (unless you stream 8K video on your phone or something) at the moment I see 5G as a net negative.

To be honest 5G is mainly appealing to the carriers as it allows for more users to be serviced with less/cheaper equipment, not so much to the end users at the moment. Phone manufacturers are also happy as they have a larger number on their spec sheet to try to bait people into paying for. It will be more appealing to the end users only once the infrastructure matures and 5G inevitably means more and cheaper data, which isn't the case at the moment as we're still essentially paying extra to cover the big deployment expenses, and we're not getting the final product worth paying for yet.

About 5G, it's still so sparsely available, it's going to take several years to be deployed consistently outside of a few miles from a major city. That's how LTE was for me, at least on Sprint, when it was deployed around this time in 2012. Some places had it, but most didn't. And Sprint isn't the best example because their coverage was shit and the worst of all four major carriers back then. Even with TMo acquiring them, they shut down Sprint towers and just left the TMo ones up and running and service is back to being shit in my house because my Magic Box from Sprint no longer works due to Sprint towers being phased out. So I imagine 5G to take the same amount of time to roll out reliably in my area, which is probably another 4 or so years. And I'm still in a suburb, just 20 miles out from Chicago, so it's not like I'm in the boonies.

I don't know what Samsung would need to announce as a feature or introduce as a service in order to get people excited again. Hardware-wise, I have zero complaints with my S10+ and didn't have any with my S7, but they just weren't exciting. Samsung Pay, as I mentioned, is fantastic and so convenient due to the MST tech versus the NFC that Apple and GPay use and I'd definitely miss that feature. But that feature has also been around since the S5 or S6, almost 5 years ago. I'm not tethered to any other Samsung services because, as I mentioned before, so many of them were discontinued. Or just not good.

Yeah the Buds are great and work well within the Samsung ecosystem, much like the AirPods do within Apple's ecosystem (macOS and iOS, both) but that might be the only other popular device, other than their phones, that Samsung has well-integrated to its OS. Maybe Samsung needed to have its Tab/Note Tab lineup sell better in order to see it a cost-effective decision to further intertwine all their devices together. While I'm sure their Samsung Watch and Buds play nice with Samsung phone and tablets, the tablet aspect is what's really killing Samsung from having all their devices play nice with each other and integrate deeper, in my opinion. It's not at the same level as iOS and macOS. When people have an iPhone, their tablet is likely to follow in the same footsteps and be an iPad. Audio? They'll get the AirPods or even the Beats that Apple was giving away for free for several years with new Mac purchases. And then the Apple Watch is the cherry on top. I don't think many people are buying Samsung tablets or smartwatches in addition to their Galaxy phones or Buds. Maybe that's a big part of the problem for Samsung and why Apple just pulls ahead. And Samsung just accepts they're not going to be at that level and users have to decide if they're willing to give up whatever they like about Samsung's phones in order to have a more complete ecosystem with Apple. I know that's my conundrum and the only thing keeping me back is Samsung Pay's convenience. And even that becomes a weaker case for me to stay with Samsung as days go by.

So the S21, again, I don't know what they can do to "wow" customers in to upgrading their Samsung phones or jumping from another OEM or iOS. Apple has been all about OS changes and adding feature via the OS. Nothing big on the hardware front. Maybe Samsung has to do the same; start making OS features the key points since hardware has been stale for everyone for several years now.

 

[masta247]

Nothing shows how big Xiaomi has become and how out of grace Samsung fell than this:
Here’s the first phone with the Snapdragon 888 — and it’s not the Galaxy S21 | Tom's Guide

The flagship phone for the Snapdragon 888 and the first one launching with it is the Mi11, a Xiaomi flagship. It's the first time a Samsung Galaxy phone isn't a launch platform for a new Qualcomm flagship chip, and it surely hurts Samsung especially badly since Qualcomm considers the 888 a huge leap forward for them, and Xiaomi all but wiped Samsung out of most of Asia except for Korea.

As for your post above, Samsung Pay, Buds and their Watches are great value adds though imho. I also think their Android skin is excellent and has all the features you'd need out of the box that other phones need a lot of dedicated apps for. They have a superior photo app, gallery has all the built-in editing tools you may need, their PIP and split-screen implementation is better than Android's and came years before it came to the OS. I genuinely think they went a long way getting to have the best skin at this point, albeit still a bit bloated. I don't like any of the Samsung apps and it bothers me that their phones come with them. I can't even delete their e-mail app, Internet browser, bixby and a bunch of other trash that is completely redundant.
The quality they deliver in Pay and Buds is enough to keep me with them as they are second to none imho though.

 

[dilla]

So I have an odd situation and I wanted to know if Android allowed something like this.

Since COVID started, more and more businesses and restaurants have been offering carry out and delivery deals but only through their apps through promo codes. Prior to COVID, I was never big on getting apps from places like that because I just didn't want them running in the background and tracking location or having access to contacts, storage, etc. I never had a storage problem, I just didn't want to keep all those apps, especially since I didn't use them all that often. But now, every place offers discounts through the app and I was thinking about starting to use them again.

So is it possible to use a user profile or something like that for just those apps that keeps them all sort of "deactivated" so they don't run in the background and also keeps them far from personal data? Like in Firefox, they have Container tabs for Facebook that run Facebook services in a separate way so that a website that has Facebook integration doesn't have access to data from other sites that you use?

So basically a Container that lets you keep the apps installed (instead of deleting and re-downloading whenever you want to use them) but also keeps them asleep and also prevents them from accessing user data a la Container tabs in Firefox?

Nothing shows how big Xiaomi has become and how out of grace Samsung fell than this:
Here’s the first phone with the Snapdragon 888 — and it’s not the Galaxy S21 | Tom's Guide

The flagship phone for the Snapdragon 888 and the first one launching with it is the Mi11, a Xiaomi flagship. It's the first time a Samsung Galaxy phone isn't a launch platform for a new Qualcomm flagship chip, and it surely hurts Samsung especially badly since Qualcomm considers the 888 a huge leap forward for them, and Xiaomi all but wiped Samsung out of most of Asia except for Korea.

As for your post above, Samsung Pay, Buds and their Watches are great value adds though imho. I also think their Android skin is excellent and has all the features you'd need out of the box that other phones need a lot of dedicated apps for. I don't like any of the Samsung apps though and it bothers me that their phones come with them. I agree Samsung doesn't have much else, but the quality they deliver in Pay and Buds is enough to keep me with them as they are second to none imho.

That might sound damning, but I think for people who pay attention to mobile news and live in the West where Xiaomi isn't as big, the fact that Xiaomi was first to get a QC chip is going to be a piece of trivia knowledge more than anything else. Maybe if it continues to happen for the next few years, more people will take notice, but if there's going to be a big shift in which OEM runs things in the Android world and it's by a Chinese OEM, Europe and Asia will be the first to notice it and it might not ever happen in the US because "Chinese."

 

[masta247]

I think the closest thing to what you're looking for can be done if you have a Samsung phone via Secure Folder. You can try experimenting with it and see if it achieves what you want. It means you aren't exactly using it as advertised but that shouldn't matter since what I believe it does is it keeps all the apps that you put there away from you main phone 'environment'.

but if there's going to be a big shift in which OEM runs things in the Android world and it's by a Chinese OEM, Europe and Asia will be the first to notice it and it might not ever happen in the US because "Chinese."

Does it though? OnePlus is already well at home in the US, and it doesn't get any more Chinese than that.
I think there are changes which magnitude we don't understand because the western media (including tech media) turn a blind eye to, and one day we'll wake up in the last small bubble that turns out being a small weird market out of touch with the rest of the world that is overtaking us as we speak. If you look at much of East Asia, their tech markets are now completely different than the one in North America, while European tech is a blend of both and its own stuff.

 

[dilla]

I think the closest thing to what you're looking for can be done if you have a Samsung phone via Secure Folder. You can try experimenting with it and see if it achieves what you want. It means you aren't exactly using it as advertised but that shouldn't matter since what I believe it does is it keeps all the apps that you put there away from you main phone 'environment'.



Does it though? OnePlus is already well at home in the US, and it doesn't get any more Chinese than that.
I think there are changes which magnitude we don't understand because the western media (including tech media) turn a blind eye to, and one day we'll wake up in the last small bubble that turns out being a small weird market out of touch with the rest of the world that is overtaking us as we speak. If you look at much of East Asia, their tech markets are now completely different than the one in North America, while European tech is a blend of both and its own stuff.

I can see the US market being another anomaly compared to the rest of the world due to ignoring Chinese OEM growth but is OnePlus that big in the US already? I tried looking up some numbers on marketshare but a lot of what I found was sales declines for all OEMs due to COVID. Most sources had all OEMs having a big drop in sales, but a few sources showed OnePlus actually having a 2% increase in sales. That's good but it still doesn't say much about US consumers' views towards OnePlus. I imagine with their sales numbers not being as high as Apple, Samsung, or even LG, a few units here and there can swing OnePlus one way or the other.

But you're right, OnePlus isn't that brand new, but OnePlus is also not the best-selling Chinese OEM, if I'm not mistaken. It's strange that it's doing as well as it has but Huawei and Xiaomi are still nowhere to be seen, at least not from carriers. I think if someone in the US wanted to purchase those phones, they'd have to import it.

So Europe may already have its healthy balance of all the OEMs, be it from China, the US, or their own brands, but the US isn't quite there yet. And maybe Xiaomi doesn't need the US to have continued success but I feel like US customers are stuck in the mindset that it's either Apple or Samsung when it comes to buying a phone, and they might not be wrong. LG and Moto are just kinda "meh" and if Xiaomi and Huawei are non-existent here, then that's kind of the only options we have. Ok, and OnePlus, but I know of only one carrier that sells OP phones and it's T-Mobile. Not the two biggest carriers in ATT and Verizon.