The new Galaxy S6 and Edge smartphones are finding their way into the hands of reporters and websites and people are trying to find faults.
Just a few days ago reports came out stating that you can bend the new handsets (with a special phone-bending device) if you apply enough pressure. Of course you could also bend a battleship if you had a big enough machine and applied enough pressure.
Yesterday reports began to surface about how hard it was to tear one of the handsets apart if you needed to repair one. But that’s a problem for the repair center not for me. The only times I have ever had to open my phone is to insert the SIM card when I first activated the device, twice to re-seat the battery when the phone was jolted and twice to pull the battery and reinsert it because the phone got hopelessly confused for some reason and needed to be rebooted.
The latest knock on the Galaxy S6 and Edge devices is that some Samsung pre-installed apps can’t actually be deleted – they can be hidden, but not entirely deleted from the phones (shades of the un-deleteable U2 album showing up uninvited on iCloud users iTunes playlists last fall). And for some inexplicable reason, the number of apps that you can actually delete depends on your carrier.
So you can bend them, they are hard to repair and you can’t delete all of the pre-installed apps entirely.
None of those things are deal breakers in my opinion.
Now if the phones had problems connecting to wi-fi hubs or if they exploded or they couldn’t run my favorite apps or the screens cracked or scratched easily or if they weighed too much or the batteries only lasted half a day then I might think twice about getting one.
But so far all the criticisms of the new Samsung handsets seem to harp on what seem to me to be some rather trivial problems.
I haven’t played with either of Samsung’s new smartphones so I couldn’t tell you how well they perform in the real world (I’ll leave the hands-on reviews to other, geekier folks).
In a way these criticisms are a validation of Samsung’s newest offerings. If these people could have found other, more important problems with the devices they would have harped on those things rather than how much force it takes to bend them, how hard it is to tear them apart or the fact you can’t delete everything.
