This week, Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S10
and the S10 Plus and also the S10e and probably a 5G phone,
and they're probably going to show off a foldable phone, too,
and maybe some smartwatches.
Yeah, it's a lot.
And I'm sure they're all going to have beautiful hardware
and be fast and have good cameras. But here's a question:
what about the software?
Can Samsung make a good user interface?
You know the story with Samsung phones, right?
Absolutely amazing hardware.
This right here is the Galaxy S9, and even a year after
it's been released, I think you could still say
it's the nicest-looking and feeling Android phone
that you can get.
But ever since, well, forever, we've always
just made fun of Samsung's software.
And it was easy to do, right?
It just felt less elegant than so-called “pure Android.”
And literally every time we review a Samsung phone, we say,
“Hey, you know what? The software is a little bit better
but it's still, you know, Samsung.”
Now, though, Samsung is finally releasing Android 9 Pie
on the Galaxy S9.
And it has this new interface called One UI.
And I have to tell you, it's pretty good.
The core idea in One UI is that we all have big phones now,
and so it's hard to reach the top of the phone.
So Samsung took an idea from Apple and iterated on it
and started putting these big headers
here at the top of the app when you first open them,
like here in Messages. It makes it easier to reach
the stuff at the bottom of the screen.
But then, when you start scrolling, the header moves up,
and your content takes up the entire screen.
You can actually see the whole progression
just through the clock app.
It starts with this try-hard attempt to clean up Android,
then they dial it back,
then they go super neon try-hard here,
then they dial it back again,
and then, finally, with One UI, they have an original idea
and they execute it well.
See, to me, there's a difference between a gimmick
and a feature.
When you see this big header thing,
at first, it definitely feels like a gimmick.
But then you use it, and it feels natural and normal, and
you barely even notice it.
And that's the difference.
A gimmick says, “Hey, look at me, look at me.
I'm the big new thing.”
But a feature just makes your phone better
without you having to think about it
or even necessarily notice it.
It wasn't always this way with Samsung software.
In fact, it was almost always bad and gimmicky.
Which means that, friends, it's time to talk about TouchWiz.
So, TouchWiz.
You know it as an Android skin.
It takes so-called “pure Android,” and it muddies it up
with all of this other crap on it that you don't really need
or like or even want.
But did you know that it didn't actually start
on Android? It started as a Windows Mobile skin.
Yeah, it's that old.
So here's the thing: I can't believe I'm doing this,
but I'm going to kind of defend TouchWiz.
Windows Mobile and the early iterations of Android,
they were just not that great.
The interfaces were kind of bad,
and you had to be a kind of computer dork
to understand how they work.
So Samsung just needed to try to clean them up
and make them a little bit easier to use
and maybe prettier in the bargain.
But well, it all went wrong in a hurry.
For one thing, Samsung didn't really come up
with its own ideas.
It just sort of made bad Android versions
of what it thought people wanted, which was iPhones.
So TouchWiz, made Samsung phones into this weird
Franken-not-quite-iPhone mess.
Also — and I'm just going to say it —
the design of TouchWiz lacked taste.
It was just kind of ugly and not very elegant.
And on the Galaxy S3, guess what it did by default?
It made this bloop noise every time you touched it.
Bloop! Bloop!
Come on.
Bloop!
Oh, and Samsung had heard that you liked features,
so it put features on top of other features.
It felt like it had to differentiate its phone,
so it just kept on cramming stuff in.
Eye-tracking that didn't really work and bloatware
and weird photo sharing features that only worked
with other Samsung phones.
It was just a confusing mess.
Yeah, this isn't much of a defense, is it?
The point is that Samsung did have the right idea.
It just did a horrible job of executing on it.
And while it was trying to fix all that,
it attached a whole lot of other bad ideas
on top of the first bad idea
until it all became a bloated mess.
TouchWiz was bad enough that Samsung finally realized
that people hated it and stopped even calling it TouchWiz.
They changed it to the Samsung Experience
a little while ago — which, by the way,
sounds like the worst band name ever.
But now they have this new thing,
which they're calling One UI.
Let's talk about skins.
One UI isn't really a skin because there's no such thing
as pure Android anymore, not in a phone that you buy.
The basics of AOSP Android, they're really, well, basic.
So everybody has to customize on top of it
to make a good phone these days.
Yes, even Pixel phones. They have the Google Experience
on top of them.
So, One UI is now Samsung Experience.
And you know what? I kind of dig it.
There's still a million weird settings
and features everywhere.
There's slide over here, which I thought I'd hate,
but I don't.
And Samsung lets you change the main buttons
to swipe up gestures, so you can reclaim a little bit
of screen real estate.
Also, dark mode in Samsung apps. They beat Google to it,
and it's really nice.
I think the S10 software is going to be a lot like
the One UI experience on this S9 here.
And again, I'm kind of into it.
But there's still a problem:
software updates.
It took Samsung four or five months to get Android 9 Pie
on the S9.
And that's bad, like really bad.
Supposedly, Google's new Project Treble system
was supposed to modularize the OS to make updates
come faster, but Samsung just isn't doing that.
Also, Bixby.
Oh, Bixby… you.
If Samsung can fix that update problem,
I could really get behind the One UI.
For one, its aesthetic just looks better.
It doesn't look cheap and like crap anymore,
and that goes a long way.
Second, I think Samsung is starting to figure out
how to include a million features
without having them all be super annoying.
Like here, in the camera app,
it kind of progressively shows you the new features
as you need them, instead of confusing you
with all of them right away.
Although, I do have to say, Samsung, you do have to chill out
with the Samsung Health app.
I don't want it. Quit showing it to me.
Anyway, most importantly, Samsung seems to have
its own ideas instead of
just trying to copy everybody else's
or paper over the problems in Android.
It has an identity that's all its own in its software.
The software here, it feels like a Samsung phone,
and that is surprisingly better than you might assume.
But I just can't get over the fact
that part of Samsung's identity
is apparently making us all wait way too long
to get software updates.
Hey everybody, thanks for watching.
Have you checked out One UI? Let me know what you think
down in the comments.
Also, stay tuned to The Verge.
We're going to have hands-ons and live blogs and everything
for Samsung's Unpacked event on February 20th.