20200127 - My Love/Hate Relationship with Samsung

Wherein I discuss the greatest of first-world problems, needing a new smartphone.

The Love

I used to be a big Motorola fanboy, so I am no stranger to the gimmickry of flagship phones. I had the original Razr, a Moto Q, and the OG Droid. At each point in my life, these were the coolest phones I'd ever owned.

I went to work for a big company that gave the entire IT department smartphones. The price was great (free) but the selection of phones was not. I was able to get a Droid X in the first round of phones, but after an incident involving carnie pickpockets at a Renaissance Festival, that phone had to be replaced, and my only choices were Samsung and Apple.

The Galaxy S3, and the S6 that replaced it were great phones for the time. I got into using new features like NFC, and the computing power to play games like Ingress was amazing. Again, these were the coolest phones I'd ever had, up to that point.

The Hate

Being a convert from the Moto Fandom, one thing that annoyed me was the Samsung's need to be a platform unto itself. There just seemed to be so many superfluous apps (navigation, cloud storage, a whole Samsung appstore) that I couldn't get rid of, and that I had to [regularly] enter and change passwords for.

If I wanted to be tied into all of those things, I would have just gotten an iPhone. Not that I have anything against iPhones, I just don't like the whole "It's the iWay or the highWay" approach to the mobile experience. Also, there just isn't a decent WiFi Spectrum Analyzer for the iPhone.

The Relationship

I have since gone to work for a small company, and I had to get my own phone again. It's more expensive than free, but at least I get to pick the phone I want. This time, I went with a Google Pixel 2. Let me tell you, other than the microphone not working within a month of getting the phone, it was the best, bloat-free phone I have owned. The fingerprint reader is super handy, and if I need to lock the phone with a legitimate password, I can do it with a simple setting change.

Of course, my Pixel 2 is a couple of years old now, and it's starting to behave strangely. I am now in the market for a new phone. The obvious choice would be the Pixel 4, but it doesn't have a fingerprint reader. It uses the 3d face scan like the iPhone, but it's not nearly as advanced. It doesn't care if your eyes are closed, and with no fingerprint reader, it will make logging in to secure things like my online banking a real pain.

The search for the ideal non-partisan smartphone

I with Samsung doing it's best to be the next Apple, I am done with them for the time being. WIth Google drifting away from it's whole "don't be evil" mantra, I am done with them as well. I am tempted to go back to Moto, although they too have their collection of Moto goop that they slather their phones in.