Samsung the heart breaker

Vlad Savov writing for The Verge: “How Samsung broke my heart”

But the Korean leopard hadn’t changed its spots. We were just riding the crest of its massive technological advantage, there was no change in philosophy. In simple terms, Samsung was still Samsung, only its products happened to be awesome enough to be desirable in their own right. The signs of this were all there, in the shadowy expanse between its glamorous product launches. Once you buy a Samsung phone, you’re pretty much on your own. Did your Galaxy S ship with a dysfunctional GPS unit? Tough. Did you hope for timely software updates to your US variant of the same phone? Tougher still.

I can’t agree more with this. I’ve repeatedly fallen for Samsung’s technical specs only to be disappointed with the experience as a whole. Both the Sprint and AT&T versions of the Galaxy S II experienced software issues that caused me to return them. The Nexus S — which I still own — was a decent experience simply because it’s a “pure” Google device.

Vlad echos something I’ve been saying for a while, Samsung does not care about the device past the release date. Once they get the fanfare, it’s dead to them and even serious bugs get ignored, denied, or if you’re lucky, fixed months later. The carriers deserve some blame but I feel the majority of it falls on Samsung.

Even the much awaited ICS update is a huge disappointment. Samsung chose to completely hide Google’s Halo skin under the same version of Touchwiz that they used on Gingerbread. While HTC uses ICS as an opportunity to scale back and update their custom UI, Samsung plods along with the same old thing and robs the user of an improved experience.

The Galaxy S III is surprisingly ugly compared to the previous model and no matter how much they try to spin the software changes, it’s not very exciting at all. If the previous models are any example, there will be serious software bugs and only if enough people get angry will Samsung act with any urgency.

If you’re looking to get a new top of the line Android phone, I’d say the HTC One X is your best option right now.