9 years late, but it is still relevant to this day, and we have more hindsight today than we had in 2015. I need to get this off my chest anyway.
These are the words of Justin Dension, Samsung's public relations person, on the Galaxy S6 keynote from March 1st, 2015 (27 minutes, 37 seconds).
Yes, it is the same Justin Denison who mocked the iPhone 7 on the Galaxy Note 7 keynote for having no headphone connector before Samsung did it themselves, but that is a topic for another day.
This is how Samsung excused making the shortest-living part of the smartphone not replaceable. It is still relevant today because it applies to smartphones Samsung released after the S6 as well. Samsung couldn't just switch to non-replaceable batteries without losing a word about it, so these words by Mr. Denison filled that gap.
Mr. Denison is telling you that the anticipation of not being able to replace a dead battery, at least not without great difficulty, is supposed to make you "confident" about charging your phone. I don't think so.
And this was only a year after the Galaxy S5 wall hugger commercial (mirror 1, mirror 2), which mocked the iPhone for its non-replaceable battery, remember? To Samsung's credit, they resisted that trend longer than Sony and HTC.
Right after dropping what might have been the most dishonest phrase in the history of smartphone keynotes, he tells us something in our face that couldn't be further from reality:
Did I hear right?
Oh, come on. Right after you drop the poorest excuse imaginable for making an expiring battery difficult to replace, you put this one on top of it? You have sacrificed water resistance, battery capacity, battery replaceability, and durability for an oh-so-premium design that the quiet majority of users don't even want. And you know it.
80 million people bought a Galaxy S4. They couldn't have cared less about its supposed lack of "premium design".
Sure, the S6 had valid improvements (64-bit processing, 15 watts fast charging, optically stabilized camera, brighter aperture, much better front camera), but claiming that convenience was not sacrificed for design is outright dishonest.
The rest of the keynote is also full of corporate nonsense like "design with purpose". With the S6 began the new age of Samsung. It is hard to believe the S4 and S6 were just two years apart from each other. It feels like those phones are from different eras.
At 28 minutes:
So what? Nothing prevented Samsung from including a wireless charging back cover in the scope of delivery in the prior years.
You won't care about thinness that much when your battery percentage is in the single digits. Have fun walking around with your oh-so-thin phone chained to a heavy bulky powerbank.
Or, as Mrwhosetheboss puts it in his video "Your Smartphone is too thin. Here’s why.":
An extra three millimeters of thickness in your phone and you won't have to carry a twenty-millimeter powerbank. Granted, more recent Samsung phones have much larger batteries than the 2550 mAh joke of the S6. For example, the A15 has 5000 mAh. Samsung thankfully realized later that people really do care about battery size more than about "slim design".
At 10 minutes flat, and at 14 minutes, 38 seconds:
But they failed to state what that purpose is, besides wireless charging, which was already implemented through the replaceable back covers on the S3, S4, and S5. Oh, I get it. The purpose is having the device break quickly so you have to buy a new one!
Samsung would have been honest if they dropped this slogan on the S5 keynote, because the S5 actually did have a design with purpose. Multiple purposes, actually. They were water-resistance and durability.
But instead, Samsung chose to give into the pressure by the loud minority who whined about the supposed lack of "premium design" on the S5.
14 minutes, 40 seconds:
And who asked for that, exactly? Compared to how many people asked for a larger and replaceable battery? Granted, Samsung made thicker (better) devices with larger batteries in recent years, such as the A15, but the replaceable battery? Not so much. Like almost every other smartphone vendor.
Indeed, J. K. Shin! People want both, and you failed to deliver.
The practicality part is more important. People want function before form. Function is the reason mobile phones exist in first place. Without function, a mobile phone is a useless brick.
Hyun Yeul Lee at 18 minutes:
Then who asked for the bright theme?
It took several years for Samsung to add a dark theme option after they switched to a bright theme (or "light theme") that both hurts the eyes and wastes battery power because black pixels need no power on AMOLED screens. Perhaps they are listening, but far too slow. Implementing a dark theme should have taken a day, not half a decade.
How long will they need to implement "always launch the rear camera regardless of the last used camera"? Or "tap to select all files between two selected files" in the file manager, which, by the way, ES File Explorer had in 2012? Another decade?
But here comes the concrete part:
So they outright admit that they made the device less functional.
In the animation, they showed how they got rid of "Move device contacts to", "Speed dial", and "Help" in the dialer app. If these features were just moved to a submenu, it is no big deal, but if they are removed entirely, that is a bad thing.
Aaaaaaand… the icons later returned.
And menus like that of "Samsung Internet" now have both icons and text, like they had in 2013 on the S4, but stopped stopped having at the S5 in 2014. Both icons and text are best. Icons are recognized faster by the eye, and text provides a description if the icon is unknown. Just have both.
In the video, they showed duplicates of some pop-ups. But indeed, I prefer push notifications instead of pop-ups because push notifications are far less intrusive.
At least, the S6 didn't nag the user once per day with a full-screen update pop-up. And once you give in and install the update, the nagging starts again in just a few days' time.
She obviously contradicts herself here. How can something that is "hard to find" get in the way? The devil is in the details.
She doesn't even mention which feature in particular she meant with "hard to use". My closest guess is that she means the features introduced on the S4 (air view, air gestures).
I believe those features should have remained available for whomever considered them useful. For example, I liked the video seek bar tooltip that could preview portions of the videos. Just because something is "hard to use" doesn't mean it should be removed. Power users still like them. Or should Linux get rid of the terminal because it is "hard to use" (to people without experience)?
A better alternative would have been making those features downloadable, ideally without requiring a Samsung account, but it is unrealistic Samsung would be so nice to users. But that's not enough. The S6 doesn't have the self-capacitive touch sensor that the S4 and S5 and Sony Xperia Sola have and used to detect a hovering finger.
Admittedly, another good thing about Air View was showing off at school. Interacting with the phone without touching it - it seemed like magic back in the day.
Now imagine arriving with a new Galaxy S6 at school and one of your class mates comes to you with his S5 from yesteryear and asks you "can your S6 do this?" while showing his Air View. Kind of embarrassing.
The non-replaceable battery opened the door for more evilness that came later: glued-in and serialized batteries. This makes it even difficult for repair shops to replace batteries, let alone the end user. And difficult means expensive. This is why evil needs to be stopped at early stages before it expands. And by "early stages", I mean January 9th, 2007, when Apple introduced the cancer of non-replaceable mobile phone batteries to the world.
As usual, whenever a tech corporation decides to lock the end user (you) down more, they do it with the usual "to protect you" excuse. Google does this, Samsung does this, all of big tech does this.
These are the words of Justin Dension, Samsung's public relations person, on the Galaxy S6 keynote from March 1st, 2015 (27 minutes, 37 seconds).
Yes, it is the same Justin Denison who mocked the iPhone 7 on the Galaxy Note 7 keynote for having no headphone connector before Samsung did it themselves, but that is a topic for another day.
This is how Samsung excused making the shortest-living part of the smartphone not replaceable. It is still relevant today because it applies to smartphones Samsung released after the S6 as well. Samsung couldn't just switch to non-replaceable batteries without losing a word about it, so these words by Mr. Denison filled that gap.
Mr. Denison is telling you that the anticipation of not being able to replace a dead battery, at least not without great difficulty, is supposed to make you "confident" about charging your phone. I don't think so.
And this was only a year after the Galaxy S5 wall hugger commercial (mirror 1, mirror 2), which mocked the iPhone for its non-replaceable battery, remember? To Samsung's credit, they resisted that trend longer than Sony and HTC.
Right after dropping what might have been the most dishonest phrase in the history of smartphone keynotes, he tells us something in our face that couldn't be further from reality:
Justin Denison said:
Did I hear right?
Oh, come on. Right after you drop the poorest excuse imaginable for making an expiring battery difficult to replace, you put this one on top of it? You have sacrificed water resistance, battery capacity, battery replaceability, and durability for an oh-so-premium design that the quiet majority of users don't even want. And you know it.
80 million people bought a Galaxy S4. They couldn't have cared less about its supposed lack of "premium design".
(source)Arun Maini (Mrwhosetheboss) said:
Sure, the S6 had valid improvements (64-bit processing, 15 watts fast charging, optically stabilized camera, brighter aperture, much better front camera), but claiming that convenience was not sacrificed for design is outright dishonest.
The rest of the keynote is also full of corporate nonsense like "design with purpose". With the S6 began the new age of Samsung. It is hard to believe the S4 and S6 were just two years apart from each other. It feels like those phones are from different eras.
At 28 minutes:
Justin Denison said:
So what? Nothing prevented Samsung from including a wireless charging back cover in the scope of delivery in the prior years.
Justin Denison said:
You won't care about thinness that much when your battery percentage is in the single digits. Have fun walking around with your oh-so-thin phone chained to a heavy bulky powerbank.
Or, as Mrwhosetheboss puts it in his video "Your Smartphone is too thin. Here’s why.":
Arun Maini said:
An extra three millimeters of thickness in your phone and you won't have to carry a twenty-millimeter powerbank. Granted, more recent Samsung phones have much larger batteries than the 2550 mAh joke of the S6. For example, the A15 has 5000 mAh. Samsung thankfully realized later that people really do care about battery size more than about "slim design".
At 10 minutes flat, and at 14 minutes, 38 seconds:
But they failed to state what that purpose is, besides wireless charging, which was already implemented through the replaceable back covers on the S3, S4, and S5. Oh, I get it. The purpose is having the device break quickly so you have to buy a new one!
Samsung would have been honest if they dropped this slogan on the S5 keynote, because the S5 actually did have a design with purpose. Multiple purposes, actually. They were water-resistance and durability.
But instead, Samsung chose to give into the pressure by the loud minority who whined about the supposed lack of "premium design" on the S5.
14 minutes, 40 seconds:
And who asked for that, exactly? Compared to how many people asked for a larger and replaceable battery? Granted, Samsung made thicker (better) devices with larger batteries in recent years, such as the A15, but the replaceable battery? Not so much. Like almost every other smartphone vendor.
Indeed, J. K. Shin! People want both, and you failed to deliver.
The practicality part is more important. People want function before form. Function is the reason mobile phones exist in first place. Without function, a mobile phone is a useless brick.
Hyun Yeul Lee at 18 minutes:
Then who asked for the bright theme?
It took several years for Samsung to add a dark theme option after they switched to a bright theme (or "light theme") that both hurts the eyes and wastes battery power because black pixels need no power on AMOLED screens. Perhaps they are listening, but far too slow. Implementing a dark theme should have taken a day, not half a decade.
How long will they need to implement "always launch the rear camera regardless of the last used camera"? Or "tap to select all files between two selected files" in the file manager, which, by the way, ES File Explorer had in 2012? Another decade?
Innovative, intuitive, relentless. The usual corporate blah-blah. Everyone says things like these about themselves. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
But here comes the concrete part:
So they outright admit that they made the device less functional.
In the animation, they showed how they got rid of "Move device contacts to", "Speed dial", and "Help" in the dialer app. If these features were just moved to a submenu, it is no big deal, but if they are removed entirely, that is a bad thing.
Aaaaaaand… the icons later returned.
And menus like that of "Samsung Internet" now have both icons and text, like they had in 2013 on the S4, but stopped stopped having at the S5 in 2014. Both icons and text are best. Icons are recognized faster by the eye, and text provides a description if the icon is unknown. Just have both.
In the video, they showed duplicates of some pop-ups. But indeed, I prefer push notifications instead of pop-ups because push notifications are far less intrusive.
At least, the S6 didn't nag the user once per day with a full-screen update pop-up. And once you give in and install the update, the nagging starts again in just a few days' time.
She obviously contradicts herself here. How can something that is "hard to find" get in the way? The devil is in the details.
She doesn't even mention which feature in particular she meant with "hard to use". My closest guess is that she means the features introduced on the S4 (air view, air gestures).
I believe those features should have remained available for whomever considered them useful. For example, I liked the video seek bar tooltip that could preview portions of the videos. Just because something is "hard to use" doesn't mean it should be removed. Power users still like them. Or should Linux get rid of the terminal because it is "hard to use" (to people without experience)?
A better alternative would have been making those features downloadable, ideally without requiring a Samsung account, but it is unrealistic Samsung would be so nice to users. But that's not enough. The S6 doesn't have the self-capacitive touch sensor that the S4 and S5 and Sony Xperia Sola have and used to detect a hovering finger.
Admittedly, another good thing about Air View was showing off at school. Interacting with the phone without touching it - it seemed like magic back in the day.
Now imagine arriving with a new Galaxy S6 at school and one of your class mates comes to you with his S5 from yesteryear and asks you "can your S6 do this?" while showing his Air View. Kind of embarrassing.
The non-replaceable battery opened the door for more evilness that came later: glued-in and serialized batteries. This makes it even difficult for repair shops to replace batteries, let alone the end user. And difficult means expensive. This is why evil needs to be stopped at early stages before it expands. And by "early stages", I mean January 9th, 2007, when Apple introduced the cancer of non-replaceable mobile phone batteries to the world.
As usual, whenever a tech corporation decides to lock the end user (you) down more, they do it with the usual "to protect you" excuse. Google does this, Samsung does this, all of big tech does this.
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