Smartphones

Ritley said:

Decided to listen in to the Apple presentation thing, are they always this cringe-y?

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Basically, yes. Apple presentations are a relic of Steve Jobs' showmanship. The team that goes up on stage anymore doesn't have the same charisma, but they largely follow the same formula; unsurprisingly, the result is uninspiring.

Ritley said:

You are missing that Apple is fucking retarded. Their “budget” phone is more expensive than last years iPhone 8 and is rocking a 2010 screen resolution.

And they continue their absolute abysmal storage pricing, $150 to go from 64 to 256. They conveniently skip what would be the most popular storage point at 128 so they can charge their extortionary prices, knowing that no one wants a fucking 64gb phone in 2019. I was considering getting an iPhone xs max, but fuck $1250 dollars for a phone that at the end of the day isn’t much better than a phone one third of the price.

Guess they gotta pay for all that renewable energy somehow

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Apple isn't "fucking retarded." They have 18% marketshare, but bring in 87% of the profits for the smartphone industry. They capture some 50% of the industry's revenue and a lion's share of the profits with only a small minority of units sold, all while continuing to take money from their customers' wallets through services ($400 "insurance" plans on phones, iTunes, App Store, overpriced branded accessories or licensing fees from less extortionary vendors, etc.).

Blame Microsoft and BlackBerry who've failed to move the market's needle.

I was using a case. Unfortunately I fell onto my phone.. the case did not survive the 235 pound impact.

Noodleface said:

I was using a case. Unfortunately I fell onto my phone.. the case did not survive the 235 pound impact.

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I've had a nightmare of a time trying to get my Note 9 returned to Samsung. It came in with scratches on the phone itself, and trying to exchange it through Samsung has proven extremely difficult.

Requested return from Samsung, and told them the reason is damage. Samsung gets phone and rejects return, listing 4 possible reasons why it could have been rejected. Immediately ships phone back to me, standard ground. Just got phone today, so with Labor day holiday, it was a 10 day process to get phone back. According to online chat, the process is they have to request a 2nd exception return label, but the request might get rejected if they determine the rejection reason was "genuine".

Just opened up my phone and there's a letter that says it was rejected because of damage. LOL.

Phone support just submitted a new request, and is now being reviewed. Phone support said that it couldn't be rejected, but who knows. They said the warehouse probably made a mistake and didn't see that I had returned it for damage.

If Samsung hadn't given me $300 for my S7 Edge trade-in I'd seriously considering just going a different phone.

RobXIII said:

I had a case for my S9+. I was out changing the oil, it fell literally 1 inch out of my pocket (I was lying under the car). ONE INCH and it smashed the screen. Gorilla glass my ass. Is the S9 note just as delicate? Makes me not want to touch Samsung again, but no thanks on the apple phones either.

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Seems to be. They say it's gorilla glass, but my Note 9 scratched super easy.

I dropped my Pixel so many times with a case and glass protector and it survived. Had to either replace the case or screen protector. I really want a Note 9 but I'm afraid to get one now.

LachiusTZ said:

Ok, so going through bills etc, and my wife has had us on a fucking cell plan at 150/mo for JUNK. Like 5gigs of Data.

I dont even like my fucking phone.

SO . . . I wanna ditch the smartphones, and convert them to data only "tablets" we can use for GPS etc, and go to old flip phones for any real use.

Is this possible? All the idiots at the cell companies (ATT / Verizon / Sprint) are telling me no, but I cant think of a reason why it is not feasible. Found some shit online that says it is.

I know we have some pros here, so looking for the "how to".

Change out the sim card for a tablet card?

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Can get straight talk for like 50.00 a month per line, used it for years and never had a problem. I'm not sure if there's a way to get away from the whole data+calls+bullshit packages anymore. You could carry around a mobile hotspot for a tablet + a flip phone but that would likely as up to more a month than what you're doing now.

Most flip phones just take a Sim card like any other cell phone.

Google fi let's you do data only plans but you require at least one phone on the account I think.

Just go to MetroPCS or whatever. They're T-Mobile but sub-branded.

Crone said:

I've had a nightmare of a time trying to get my Note 9 returned to Samsung. It came in with scratches on the phone itself, and trying to exchange it through Samsung has proven extremely difficult.

Requested return from Samsung, and told them the reason is damage. Samsung gets phone and rejects return, listing 4 possible reasons why it could have been rejected. Immediately ships phone back to me, standard ground. Just got phone today, so with Labor day holiday, it was a 10 day process to get phone back. According to online chat, the process is they have to request a 2nd exception return label, but the request might get rejected if they determine the rejection reason was "genuine".

Just opened up my phone and there's a letter that says it was rejected because of damage. LOL.

Phone support just submitted a new request, and is now being reviewed. Phone support said that it couldn't be rejected, but who knows. They said the warehouse probably made a mistake and didn't see that I had returned it for damage.

If Samsung hadn't given me $300 for my S7 Edge trade-in I'd seriously considering just going a different phone.

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So this issue is still on-going. It's 6-8+ days in between e-mail responses, and when I call them, being nice doesn't work, being mean doesn't work, screaming doesn't work, and they just say that they've escalated it to their Warehouse team, and there isn't a way to contact the warehouse team.

So I'm sitting around waiting for the warehouse team to acknowledge that they fucked up, and rejected my return in error. At that point, they'll print me a new return shipping label, and I can send it back to them.

In hindsight, I should have been using the phone this whole time. Ugh. I just figured that it wouldn't take this long to process, and was afraid of something else happening to it, and then really having the return rejected.

Their entire return process has been a nightmare, and really turned me off to them. FML.

Not sure if I should post it here or start a new thread, but I have a Smartphone question. I have a low end Samsung (Galaxy J3) on Android 5.1.1, never had a single issue with it, but yesterday it went nutty. Out of the blue, without me doing anything special (no new app, no setting change, but I was in a place where I auto connected to wifi so it might have auto-updated something?), I lost just about all app related user settings/saves and got spammed with a "Unfortunately Google App has stopped" error message. Contacts and gallery were untouched, installed apps were all there, background was not impacted, but the apps behaved just like I never used them before: saves in games were gone, bookmarks in the samsung browser were gone, the weather widget had no location set, Gmail warned me of dozens of unread mails that I indeed read already, etc...

I went to the classic "turning the phone off and turning it back on" universal fix, but it did nothing. I then cleared cache and data of Google App, which fixed the error spam, but got then an error spam for Google Play Service (I think). Cleared cache and data, fixed that spam. I reconfigured WhatsApp and got all my messages back for that, but I am a bit perplexed about what happened, and would very much know if it's possible to recover the saves of some apps I have not relaunched (I assume the new auto saves of apps I launched made unrecoverable the old saves?).

As clues as to what caused this, I should say that I almost never turn the phone off and that I might not have been on point as far as updates go.... any idea? Any possible fix? Any way to avoid having this happen again?