Samsung Seals Out Galaxy S6 Users to Satisfy Critics

"Sticks and stones may break my phones, but words can never harm them," the (modernized) bromide goes. Unfortunately, in designing its new Galaxy S6 phone, Samsung let its critics' words influence its product decisions in ways that harm the user experience. The new phone and its curved sibling, the Galaxy S6 Edge, both look nice. But in order to achieve the unibody design journalists asked for, the company did away with its removable batteries, upgradable storage and water resistance.

Up until now, Samsung's flagship phones have been made of plastic — a design that has made it easy for the company to build in removable back panels and give users access to the battery bay and a microSD card slot. Astute consumers can buy replacement back panels with different designs or enhanced functionalities, such as wireless charging (which the new model has built-in). They can even get larger batteries with back panels that jut out to make room for them.

MORE: Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge Hands-on - Pros and Cons

The new Galaxy S6, like the iPhone and HTC One lines, uses a unibody design with a sealed back. Its front and back surfaces feature an attractive layer of opaque Gorilla Glass in such colors as black, white and topaz, while a real metal band rings the sides. Perhaps it would have been possible to include a removable back without compromising the design or adding cost — we don't know for certain — but it seems unlikely. Another disadvantage of the new Galaxy S6 design is that it isn't water-resistant like the Galaxy S5, which can survive for up to 30 minutes in up to a meter of water.

Comments

Qualcomm teases Snapdragon 820 while launching Sense ID fingerprint scanner

Qualcomm has announced a new fingerprint scanner destined for smartphones, called Sense ID , which uses ultrasonic sound waves to map the surface of your finger. Previous methods of fingerprint recognition used high-resolution capacitive sensors, but switching to ultrasonic sensors has a number of benefits. Firstly, these types of sensors are more accurate than their capacitive counterparts, as they're able to recognize the pores and ridges on your finger for increased security. They're also not as susceptible to moisture as previous sensors, and can work through glass, sapphire, plastic and even metal. Sense ID sensors will be compatible initially with Snapdragon 810 and 425 SoCs, although you'll eventually see them supported across the entire range of Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 series SoCs. As well as launching Sense ID, Qualcomm has teased their upcoming flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 820 . Qualcomm has designed their own 64-bit capable ARMv8 cores for this SoC...

First Take: Back to the future — Nasdaq 5000 circa 2015

The once-deflated Nasdaq has fully reflated. For the past 15 years, chatter about Nasdaq 5000 was mainly in the past tense, a historical remnant of the dot-com stock bubble era. But today, for the first time since March 2000, the Nasdaq composite — powered by Apple, the world's most valuable company and maker of the iPhone, and a fresh wave of innovation in social media, digital technology and biotech — is back above 5000 and very much alive in the current events debate. Way back when, on March 9, 2000, when the Internet was in diapers and investors were betting that the World Wide Web would be a moneymaking investment of epic proportions, the Nasdaq and its army of newly minted dot-com stocks skyrocketed to its first close above 5000, up an eye-popping 111% from a year earlier. At the time, "Nasdaq 5000" elicited a 1969 "man on the moon"-type awe from investors ranging from Wall Street titans to taxi drivers and hairdressers who viewed "Net stocks...

GOOGLE IS PLANNING TO OFFER ITS OWN CELLULAR DATA NETWORK

BY DANIELLE HOWE Move on over, traditional phone plans. Following weeks of rumors that it would introduce its own cell-data network, Google confirmed reports that it will be indeed taking on the endeavor. The search-engine giant made the announcement at the wireless show in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday that it will sell data plans for smartphones and tablets in the next coming months. It hasn’t been revealed which wireless carrier would be hosting the Google service, but various reports suggest that Sprint and T-Mobile are the frontrunners. The move comes as a game changer for the wireless network market, though Google insists that its plan is not to become a huge competitor in that field. “We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products. “Our goal here is to drive a set of innovations which we think the ecosystem should evolve and hopefully will get traction.” The decision co...

News420

Search This Blog