Hi everyone. So,
as is tradition here at The Androidizen we tend to take a look not only at the
latest smartphones but also what's wrong with the latest smartphones
as well. As with every device nothing is perfect out of the
gate and tends to get patched in afterwards unless it happens to be a hardware
issue. So with the Galaxy S6 now having been
out for around two weeks, we can get a better idea as to some of the problems and
failures Samsung have encountered here.
Now it has to be said that in my opinion the Galaxy S6 is the best quality assured
device Samsung has
ever made. If we kind of go back to the Galaxy S4, the Galaxy S5
Note 4 and so on, there has been a real
dearth really in good quality coming out of Samsung for the last few years.
Anyone who's a regular here will know I have railed against Samsung many times
over for this.
Now the Galaxy S6, as I say, is one of the
best QA devices I think I've ever come across. Just browsing through forums at XDA and other
places
there are very few problems being reported. There's
the usual kind of problem sure, Samsung are having some
issues with the screen and a rainbow type effect that some people are
complaining about. Now, part of this is down to the glasses you're wearing, polarised
lenses and sometimes it's down to
direct sunlight and angling the screen at particular angles, but at the end of the day that's AMOLED
for you.
I wouldn't necessarily say that's a problem or a failure. That's more a case that's the
technology Samsung
uses. But one of the issues that has been driving me mad for
the last two weeks that I've had and my device is doing it right now,
is the wifi simply disappearing.
Just, whoof, vanished into thin air. Now this seems to happen
after the device has been left effectively on standby,
so not using the device overnight and not plugged into a wall socket so effectively it's
not receiving any external charge.
Now what I'm just going to show you here is my wifi is turned
on but if we come up here can you see up at the top here
we have absolutely no wifi signal? Now,
if we come into wifi you can see that it effectively has
lost sight of the majority of the wifi access points
around me which is strange it's picking up a 2g which is actually not my access
point and is
halfway down the road and a Sky, which I have no idea where that is.
But if we turn the wifi off and we turn the wifi back on again
it will scan, find the access point and connect straight away.
Now as I say, this is a bug that I've been dealing with now for
well two weeks since the device was launched and there is absolutely no
obvious fix for it. As you can see other
5g hubs are being picked up
once it's being reset and likewise that 2g hub was being picked up
before it was being reset so there's not necessarily
a good rhyme or reason to what is going on here.
My guess is that this is down to the amount of power
that is being pushed through the wifi whilst it's in standby state.
Effectively, when the device comes back online active to the screen
there's not enough juice being pushed down the wifi to then detect
all of the different hubs nearby. Either that or it is simply a
handshaking issue with effectively that initial kind of ping going
hi what's out there what's out there give me those signals and for whatever
reason
the device is simply not making those connections correctly.
Let me know if you've had this particular bug with the wifi
and if you happen to know a foolproof fix for it.
Right now I believe it to be a software issue and Samsung are going to have to get
that patched up.
Now one of the other issues people have been talking about quite a bit
and a few videos have popped up online showing, demonstrating this problem as
well.
If you look at the camera module and what I'm going to do, I'm just going to zoom
this right in.
Now can you see this raised
piece of plastic round the outside? Not this flat piece here
but this piece round the edge. Effectively
the silver band here down to the flush exterior of the case.
Now the interesting thing here is whilst the back of the case effectively is Gorilla Glass
this camera module is effectively a plastic and what they've had to do
is actually, it's like a sprayed
on white coating effectively like a polymer a spray polymer,
but over time because of the way this camera module kind of sits, it's raised
up above the edge
this is prone to chipping unfortunately. Now
part of the issue here could very well just be a manufacturing process that's
going to be improved over time. Or
it could just be an inherent issue with the way this spray polymer
has been bonded to, I assume this is just plastic.
Effectively it is not as good a bond as it could be
and it is liable to chip. So Samsung do still have some work to do
on the quality assurance but I have to say they've done an incredible job this
time round in creating
a device that frankly is the best in class
not only from a physical hardware and software point of view
but also from the point of view of not having loads and loads of bugs and errors
and issues. Even down to things like the battery life
they've patched that very quickly through one of their third party
apps. And it's made a big impact on battery life. So a lot of the issues that we're kind of
raising here
I don't honestly think are going to be long-term issues for this device. They
feel like things that
can be tweaked, either through software or through the manufacturing process.
The only down side I suppose there is the AMOLED screen is
always going to give you that slight rainbow effect. But that's what AMOLED does.