Samsung Galaxy's flagship leaks ... don't matter much. Here's why

Just because Apple does something...

Of course not. Otherwise we'd all be ham-handling Bluetooth one-button hockey puck "pointing devices". But that only means MS, Logitech, Kensington, Targus, etc. didn't suddenly snap and start believing that we would all want that-- or that we should all want that, back then. Something went terribly wrong after that.

Re: No jack, Jack.

I agree about the "notch" or "hole-punch". I don't use the following words lightly, but I absolutely hate this design and absolutely will not buy such a phone because it is incredibly distracting. I am not a fan of the rounded corners and edges on Samsung phones (I have already complained about my S8 elsewhere on El Reg) as it is but cutouts in the screen are just ridiculous. As far as I can tell it's just a bodge to get a "bigger" screen in the same size footprint and BLX to display quality and user experience and sadly people go and buy the damn things so the manufacturers think it's a success.

Some may say that I am biased because I have never taken a "selfie" (I don't know if the camera on the front of my current phone even works), but I've had phones with cameras, proximity detectors and so on embedded in the front near the earpiece just fine before now that didn't come with a massive screen defect fobbed off as a "feature" forced upon me out of the box.

Please, any manufacturers reading this, not everyone in your user demographic is a teen selfie addict who takes thousands of photos of themselves every day. Innovate, sure - but gaping holes in the display ? I'm not buying it - literally. Make a phone with a flat screen, replaceable battery, microSD card slot and an earphone socket and we'll talk. Damn, I miss my old S4. Still one of Samsung's best selling phones, I believe. I wonder why that was.

But there *is* a headphone jack!

It's even in shown in an image in the article*, as well as being confirmed by other sources. Look again - don't take the Reg's word for anything, especially when they can word stuff just to wind you up.

* The image that shows the bottom of the phone, the headphone jack is where it's been for the last few years of Galaxy, next to the USB port.

Re: No jack, Jack.

The excuse was always "size".

In fact they then just stuck in ten times more rubbish that nobody wanted (quad-cameras and suchlike). So I don't believe that.

And if you've had to pay £799 for a smartphone, you surely don't want to have to rebuy EVERY accessory that you had to buy with your previous similarly-priced smartphone. So I can understand that frustration.

If you bought a £1000 laptop tomorrow, to replace a £1000 laptop two years ago, would you be happy about having to buy all-new USB cables, display cables (HDMI), audio cables (ironically), etc. every time you do that? Sure, once for a generation, and then buy a backwards-compatible cable (e.g. you can still your USB mouse with a USB-C -> USB adaptor or hub, etc.) but not every damn laptop.

New phone = new charger = new case = new car-cable = new car-holder = new USB cable = new headphones and so on... adding to that list doesn't help at all, when cheaper phones don't require that (a double-whammy saving). And that's assuming you don't share that stuff with other phones/audio devices - now you may have to upgrade your in-car aux port, buy bluetooth dongles, keep two cables including one for that old phone you gave the wife, two headphones - one that works at home, one that works on the phones, etc. etc.

I'd expect an £800 phone to do everything a 5-year-old £800 phone could do... and more. Not less.

But then, I have literally not spent £800 on phones in my entire life. Not even if you include the landline phones and cordless handsets of old.

If I was to go to such an £800 phone, I'd have to rebuy and change the way I do everything with my current phone - plugging it in in the car, charging it (the cables on my car, the battery packs - if they are capable of fast charging it already- the chargers at home, etc.), putting a case on it, etc. and it would quickly turn into a £1000 exercise and a complete change of how everything I do on or with the phone works (even signing into it... aren't PINs frowned upon nowadays?).

Or I could spend £200, get something "one model up" on my current phone that uses the same cables, does everything I already do, and more. Alright it won't be a famous brand but... (shrug).

There's a reason I stuck on the S5 mini. Nothing else has the IR blaster. And I use that. Sure, there might be dongles that do it, or BluRay players you can control with an app, but now I'm buying those and setting those up too, having to bolt on extras (that don't fit in even the new case), after having spent lots of money on a phone that then can do "What I did before, but has a 4K camera I'll never use".

When I went from an S4 mini to and S5 mini the transition was seamless. Last year, I reflashed the S4 mini with LineageOS and use it as a living room remote control and "quick google" device. It's actually faster, smoother, higher version of Android, etc. than the S5 mini is and lost no functionality - it even uses the same cables. The choice I face is now really "new phone" or "risk LineageOS on the S5 mini that's not as well supported". A few-hundred pound phone that did everything I needed, without the junk, and requires no extraneous purchases stands out as a better choice to me than splashing £800 on a phone that then requires all kinds of nonsense that probably won't work on my other phones.

Smartphone manufacturer's will learn eventually, but it's gonna hurt them to get there. They will have to settle for people like me buying not-so-smart phones at cheaper prices and demanding things like aftermarket battery replacements and legacy ports.

Isn't it a bit self-defeating to sell a £799 smartphone that openly ignores the requirements of its own target market and lets the Archenemy define what is to be called the Right Thing?

Re: No jack, Jack.

"Isn't it a bit discordant to complain about £25 headphones to go with a £799 smartphone?"

I've yet to find _any_ bluetooth headphones with audio quality as good as a decent pair of wired ones.

Re: No jack, Jack.

A free adapter isn't free; it costs you the proper use of that port. And if it's 3cm of a thing, it's more massive than the old jack and the DAC and whatever other discrete bits got "optimized" out. And being a dongly thing, it gets lost.

Re: No jack, Jack.

"How can that overshadow all the new tech squeezed into a new flagship phone?"

Because, quite literally, I do not care about all that new tech.

Faster processor. Cool. But my current phone isn't slow.

More RAM. Sure. But my current phone has never run out of memory.

More internal storage. But my current phone has a 128Gb microSD inside it... good luck beating that for the price of a cheap 128Gb card off Amazon.

More cameras. I literally use my phone to take a photo maybe a handful of times a year. When I do, it's usually to email the photo, and having a HUGE image file result of that just means I need to shrink it to email it. I honestly don't even need HD most of the time, even if I wanted (why?) to take a lovely photo of my daughter to print out at high quality. My current phone is so sufficient, I've never questioned its capabilities in taking a photo.

Voice recognition. My current phone has it in apps everywhere and it doesn't work for me anyway. I consider it the slowest form of command-issuing that there is, short of getting a machine-learning camera to interpret semaphore that I flag to it.

Biometric authentication. My current phone has a fingerprint reader. I've literally used it once. To demonstrate how useless it is in terms of security (the old gummy bear tricks).

My phone has 802.11n 5GHz wifi, Bluetooth, NFC, hotspotting, all the usual. I actually use some of them. NFC I use precisely to demonstrate to people how easy it is to read data off your credit cards in your pocket by just swiping a phone near you (and then explain that that just powers up the cards, and once powered up, I could read the radio signal from half a mile away with the right antenna). I use it to convince people to use RFID-blocking wallets, purses and card-sleeves.

All your fancy new tech literally means *nothing* to me. Same way that I could buy a laptop tomorrow that could run every one of my 1000 Steam games faster than I've ever been able to run them. But the fact is that my high-end laptop from 2014 can do exactly that, to the point that I can play through GTA V or any of the other most-demanding games that I have without noticing the performance even once anyway. So what would an upgrade gain me? A worse version of Windows, replicating years of my laptop setup, having to reinstall just about everything, finding none of my accessories in my laptop bag fit any more or need adaptors to work, so on a plane the new laptop looks like Jodrell Bank in order to sit and play a game without disturbing others if I dont' want to re-buy every accessory I already have.

This is what Samsung et al are discovering. I will not pay one penny extra to have a 4K rather than a HD camera. Or screen. I will not pay one penny extra to have edge-to-edge screens. I will not pay one penny extra for the AI chip, or 3D cameras, or any other junk.

But I *WOULD* pay a proportionate price increase over a base model for a headphone socket, a removable battery, NOT to have an edge-to-edge screen but a plain, flat bit of glass that I can replace for £20, a larger battery, a decent case built-in to the phone, hell I'd even accept it being three times as thick as the "slim" phones they want to sell me. I wouldn't even notice.

If you gave me a Dell-website-like customisation of a smartphone, I'd happily turn all those new features off. I'd happily PAY to remove some of them. And I'd happily pay to add back in the stuff I need. Hell, I'd pay just to have standard Android and an unlocked bootloader (which some smartphone companies now actually let you do!).

Just because "it's technically better" does not mean "it adds sufficient value to my purchase that I will automatically part with more money". I can get a ridiculous top-of-the-line graphics card today if I'm willing to part with several grand. But I'd much rather pay less, "only" get 60fps in every game available to me, and then spend the excess on something else that gets me more value.

Smartphone companies are slowly waking up to this. There will always be "But I must have 4K/8K/HDR/128Kbps FLAC/etc." guys. But they are niche. Most people just need a phone "good enough". Same way most people just need a laptop "good enough". Once you get past that point, people are loathe to pay extra, especially if they LOSE features they are accustomed to (e.g. find a cheap laptop that has an optical drive - and, no, I don't want to carry one round with me separately everywhere I go).

Companies found it out with PCs and laptops. A few years later, the bottom started to drop out of the market because people didn't WANT that extra rubbish, as the market had reached full penetration so nobody was buying something that they hadn't seen a million times before and learned that if they follow every possible upgrade, they cost themselves money for nothing and eventually lose functionality.

P.S. I also would not pay ANY extra to have, say, Samsung or Apple logos on my phone. It means nothing to me. I don't mind having the former on there. The latter is a big no-no to me because of what it means in terms of other features. But I wouldn't pay anything extra between two otherwise identical models to get the Samsung or the Apple model.

We don't know yet I suppose, and leaked pictures can be mock-ups, but the GSM currently listed specs do also say it will have a 3.5mm jack. (Though since I read them I'm not sure what to believe...)

Re: Station idents become invisible to the TV viewer

You DO know the station idents appear over the air, too, meaning there's no escape even with an antenna? For them, they have you by the short-and-danglies. You want their programs from their networks, you put up with their watermarks (and that's what they really are: watermarks to identify recorded programs and so on). Unless you're willing to just cut all cords and go without television (including the news) forever.

Re: No headphone jack..

Thanks for the clarification.