Microsoft cramming free stuff into Galaxy S6es? Not so fast – US telcos Microsoft has been working with smartphone makers to get its mobile apps onto more customers' phones, but as long as carriers have a say in it, Redmond might not be able to obtain the broad reach it's hoping for. Samsung announced in March that its new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge flagship phones would ship with Microsoft's …
... join them
That's a fair business decision - can't fault MS for that. One division that is looking to extend it's reach should not be confused with another that can't sell phones.
On the bright side of being a Brit consumer in the mobile (cell) market I can always choose to be done over by a home grown firm (Vo(ice)da(ta)fone) from Newbury whilst using a foreign manufactured device that sucks my eyeballs out. Or I could be done over by a foreign firm with a foreign device. Thankfully I have choice - I know of several countries that don't even have that.
The thing is I feel torn about this ( to be fair, in as much as I give a monkey's which isn't much).
On the one hand if every one else is doing it, then yes good luck to Microsoft.
But on the other hand, it pi**es me off no end that phones come with so much preinstalled cr*p that usually can't even be removed.
If mobile phone companies sold cars you'd have to drive past their shop at the start and end of every journey and the radio would always turn on to their station.
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you cant remove them without root access but you can disable them.
So then they don't appear and importantly means they won't download any updates (and take up any further storage).
I agree though you should be able to remove them if you want to, or better still not be preloaded at all.
the one point that made me laugh in the story was that Verizon claim they want there customers to have choice. ROFL.
Yes, bloody annoying. They steal valuable storage so the system partition is big enough for the crapware, then updates end up using the user partition anyway. And there's not much chance of recovering the wasted space even rooted.
Install packages can happily flash user space, there's not technical reason they have to abuse system space like this.
Removing the SD slot doesn't change Samsung's position at all, unless they removed the code that understands vFAT, which is unlikely since it will still be used in other ways.
Anyway, Microsoft claims around 200 (!) patents that apply to Android, the vFAT thing is just the one that everyone always talks about but you don't really think Microsoft could shake down Android OEMs for $5 a phone or whatever they're getting based on that single patent, do you? They would have simply dropped vFAT support years ago after Microsoft came knocking and had the SD card use ext3 - tell people to download a driver onto their PC if they need to remove the card from their phone and read it there.
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