I am unexpectedly the owner of a Sprint Galaxy Note 8, day 1
What happened to the HTC 10?
My HTC 10 had a bad battery. It died right out of warranty, or not died so much as the camera started streaking at 20% and the battery would die at 15. Two weeks ago it was at 26% the phone would die at, and today it was 42%. It also got hot all the time.
I couldn’t sent it to HTC and wait for their repairs, I needed it fixed now. Unfortunately I didn’t have a backup phone capable of doing what was needed (wife’s in possession of my M9, M8 I forget what happened to it, M7 water fried, EVO 4G LTE evidently has passed on – can’t get anything other than a charge light, anything prior not nearly fast enough) so I went to a local store that said they could fix it.
I’d checked with several other stores via a Yelp request a quote thing, got back a lot of negatories on fixing it, had one guy call me up and tell me he would fix any other phone, but that what was going to happen with his crew was they would replace the battery and the digitizer or LCD would be broken and that was always the case.
Finally had a company say they were interested, had never had a failure like the above, and I talked with them. Battery arrived and I got down there after making a nandroid, guy got the battery out over the course of about 30 minutes peeling the HTC 10 away layer by layer, removed the battery with the skill of a surgeon, placed the whole thing back slowly and the LCD was broken, but the digitizer worked perfectedly. So yeah.
We’ll see what happens in a couple of days when the display shows up.
An HTC man goes to Samsung
After having been on HTC products since a Windows phone, through the EVOs, and up the an HTC 10, I’m going to just describe the issues I’ve run into on this Samsung. This phone is blazing fast, however Sprint and Samsung have managed to over-app the thing to the point of absurdity.
Installing Netflix? Oh we’ve got an app that will help with that video. Installing a game? Oh here’s another app that will assist with the apps you’ve got. Want to install Chrome Beta? Oh here have the Sprint homepage set for you.
About your voicemail, let’s try and sell you Sprint’s Visual Voicemail. Connected to a WiFi? Oh it’s insecure and now we want to sell you an app to make it secure (a VPN.) Like getting calls do you? How about you subscribe to our anti-spam subscription service?
Over the course of two hours that I attempted to rebuild on this Note 8 I was hit by an advertisement probably every 10 minutes for another service that had been preinstalled either by Samsung, or by Sprint. Not having access to a stock Samsung I can’t say where one company’s ads ended and another begin.
A quick list of what’s installed on the Sprint Note 8
(that Paul thinks is bloatware)
- Lookout Antivirus
- NextRadio
- App Spotlight
- 1Weather
- AAA (the auto agency)
- Uber
- Amazon Kindle
- Prime Photos
- Audiobooks
- Amazon Music
- Amazon Shopping
- Prime Video
- FB Messenger
- Sprint Caller ID/voicemail/spot/backup/secure wifi/tech expert/worldwide/cloud binder/music plus
- Tidal
- Google Duo (I didn’t want it, why’s it a system app?)
- Rolling widget ads for Hulu, various games, hbo now, letitgo, candy crush Final fantsy, DFNDR
This probably doesn’t include the popups for Bixby, the various services to make the video look better.
I mean where else can someone drop … what are these things running at? $1000 or so and have advertising and bloatware crammed down their throats.
I started by removing Lookout as, well, it’s garbage in my opinion. Yup, you can remove this garbage without root. That’s all I have kilt as of this writing.
Initial impressions
Holy hell it’s fast. Scored a 171200 on Antutu, which is slower than the HTC U 11 (~174K) we had for a while scored but feels faster.
All the advertising spam on Sprint is making it a huge turn off.
Didn’t think I was going to particularly be impressed by the screen but dang.
Huh, managed to get it the same day that Knox was defeated by a root method. That’s cool.
Low light photos look like garbage. I’m reading this is not supposed to be so so I’ll check the settings tomorrow. I think the resolution is set wrong.
Pictures, getting rid of the bloat without root, and reviews to come.
