Some observations on the Galaxy S10+
While my Galaxy Note 8 is otherwise useless outside of WiFi range, I’m rocking an S10+ and – hrmm, I’m both impressed and underwhelmed and that’s what this is about.
Screen size significantly less than expected
Compared to the Note 8 there’s a more X and Y real estate, but this gets dropped for things like videos as the entire upper status bar is not accessible to full screen.
So yeah, look at the nav bar area above, half of that’s going to be absent from Netflix / YouTube / your games / etc. The bottom area will be rounded, the top will be squared. A new meaning of irk will appear.
While video couldn’t probably take advantage just due to the aspect ratio, games seemed to universally be just that that area was off limits. That or I have bad games.
The notch
While somewhat annoyed at the lack of real estate caused by the notch, it’s not particularly annoying. I got a wallpaper of Wall-E in the top right and it’s unnoticeable.
Need for Speed
It’s fast, I’ll give it that. The day that I got it AnTuTu was claiming I beat 98% of all phones on the planet. That appears to have changed to 80% of phones on the planet. It’s noticeably faster than the Note 8 was (and I had no plans on updating from the 8, I was satisfied with it at the time).
That unlocking tho…
—All thumbs
I wrote earlier that the fingerprint scanner was fooled. This actually surprised me as I properly trained it and I can’t even unlock it half the time with my real fingers.
I ended up having to register my thumb twice, once at an angle about 45 degrees, just because it could not recognize it when rotated. I’ve heard rumors it gets better. Let’s hope.
I’ve had a lot of fingerprint scanner experience, I have thumbs. I know things. This isn’t working well.
—Just one look
The less secure visual unlock registered my face and has unlocked every time. It’s unlocked when I have sunglasses on. It’s unlocked with half a pillow over my head. I’m actually a little concerned that it’s too easy as in anyone who looks vaguely like me could unlock it.
Gone appears to be my retina scanning which at least felt like it was secure, even if it did take a bit
Transferring that data
I had a fairly smooth (for me,) data transfer experience. I think I would have had a much smoother experience if the WiFi of the store I was in worked better as it claimed it was going to take somewhere on the neighborhood of two hours to transfer 5 gigabytes.
So no… I went back to work and finished up both the OS update (1.8 gigs,) and 160 apps downloading and installing. I don’t think everything transferred like it was supposed to do in Samsung land, but most things did and that was good.
I’m not sure how much was the Samsung Cloud transfer and how much was Google, but yeah. I had to reenter Facebook and Twitter info and a couple of passwords in really really crappy apps, but game data and most apps were the same as on my Note 8.
Holy crap that camera
What I’m consistently seeing in photos is that they don’t annoy me. I mean, I get ticked off at artifacting, when what I’m seeing is not what I’m getting, and when the colorblind man can spot a color failure.
The new cameras seem to be picking up the light / HDR when needed significantly better than the Note 8, or perhaps it’s just that it’s finally sunny after what felt like 5 years of winter and rain.
That’s it for this installment. I’ll write some more about this tomorrow got a kiddo to spring from the pre-school pokey.
