It was around a month back that the Galaxy Tab S3 finally received the Android Pie update, and Samsung is now expanding the rollout to a few more markets. The update that’s rolling out to countries this week — software version T820XXU3CSJ3 — includes the October 2019 security patch, so while those countries had to wait longer for the Pie update, they are also getting a newer build with more recent security fixes.
Like other Galaxy devices, the Galaxy Tab S3 gets One UI with the Android Pie update along with plenty of other features, such as a system-wide Night mode theme. Samsung is already testing One UI 2.0 for the Galaxy S10 while Tab S3 owners are getting their taste of the initial version of One UI, and that’s what they will have to live with unless they upgrade to one of Samsung’s new tablets as the Galaxy Tab S3 is not eligible for the Android 10 and One UI 2.0 update.
The Android Pie update with the October security patch is currently available in Peru, Panama, Chile, and Colombia for the Wi-Fi variant and is rolling out over the air. You can download it by opening the Settings app on the tablet, navigating to Software update and tapping the Download updates manually option. We also have the Android Pie firmware available in our firmware archive if you’d like to upgrade without waiting for the OTA release.
Yet more evidence suggesting the Galaxy Home smart speaker is just around the corner emerged this week, this time through Samsung’s own Smart Things app. As seen in the image below, shared with us on Twitter by one of our readers, the Smart Things setup process now features imagery of the Galaxy Home, strongly hinting that the smart speaker’s market debut should be just around the corner.
Galaxy Home teasers continue with no firm launch date in sight
The Galaxy Home is one of Samsung’s most elusive smart products. It’s been more than a year since it was officially unveiled along with the Galaxy Note 9, but 2018 passed, April 2019 came and went, and there was still no Galaxy Home in sight. Rumors claimed it may have been canceled before its market debut but we exclusively debunked this, and hints of the product’s existence continued to emerge through various channels including Spotify.
The Galaxy Home is a Bixby-powered smart speaker and will be the first Samsung product of its kind. We don’t have a lot of details about its capabilities but we know it won’t be a direct Amazon Echo competitor. Instead, it will put a higher emphasis on audio quality, and AKG will play a role in tuning the directional audio speakers.
Samsung has been very quiet about the Galaxy Home but it doesn’t seem like it ever stopped developing the product. It’s unclear why the company decided to push back the original April 2019 release. Even the Galaxy Fold made a return to the market in the meantime, and that product’s original launch was marred by glaring technical issues and negative press coverage.
Whatever the reasons behind the Galaxy Home’s delay may be, we seem to perpetually be getting closer to the release of the product and there’s a chance that it will be unveiled later this month at SDC. Kim Hyun-suk, CEO of Samsung’s Consumer Electronics Division previously stated that the Galaxy Home should hit the shelves in the second half of the year, and the holiday season is looming.
We’ll keep you up to speed once we find out more about the Galaxy Home’s whereabouts. Stay tuned and feel free to let us know in the comment section if you still have an interest in Samsung’s upcoming Bixby-powered smart speaker.
As our longtime readers will know, we often make changes to the site design for SamMobile.com. It’s all done to make sure that our readers can quickly find the information that they’re looking for and that their visit to our website is a pleasant one. To that end, we have made some significant changes to the design once again and would like to walk you through them.
There’s great news for people who love a darker theme. Our Dark Mode, a feature that was previously limited to premium members, is now available for everyone. You’ll find the toggle in the upper right hand corner, just click on the moon to enable Dark Mode. Eagle-eyed users will notice that the font seems familiar. We’re using the same Samsung One font as the one used for One UI.
The homepage now has a list view so that visitors can see more news articles on the homepage and quickly get up to date on the latest Samsung news. A fire icon has also been added to show the hottest news stories, you know, the ones that you should absolutely read. We will continue to make tweaks and improvements as we go along.
Please do leave a comment below and let us know what you like or dislike about this new design. We’re always happy to consider any suggestions that our readers have.
The Galaxy S11 is at least five months away from the official unveiling, but leaks and rumors have already started appearing online. Today, Galaxy Club has spotted a disguised Galaxy S11 on the HTML5Test browser benchmark website, revealing a tiny bit of information about its display and the onboard Android version.
Going by the benchmark listing, the Galaxy S11 (or whatever the next Galaxy flagship is called) will come with a 20:9 display, which means it will be taller than the 19:9 screens on the company’s 2019 flagships. Samsung already has a couple of mid-range devices such as the Galaxy A70 and the A80 with 20:9 ratio displays
The benchmark also suggests that the Galaxy S11 will launch with Android 10 onboard, but that’s not surprising and is on expected lines. The listing reveals information about the screen resolution as well, but it’s inaccurate, as is often the case with these benchmarks.
If you’re wondering about the SM-G416U model number in the benchmark, do note that Samsung has been using the SM-G4xx series for years to disguise its flagship devices while testing. The company usually replaces the first two digits while retaining the last digit and the latter in the model number, which suggests the benchmark result probably belongs to the SM-G986U model. This could be the 5G version of the Galaxy S11 Plus going by the current naming pattern.
While a lot of this information and conjectures look credible, it’s worth remembering benchmark results can be faked easily. We have to wait for more leaks to get a better picture of the Galaxy S11. Thankfully, that shouldn’t take long as we inch closer to the end of the year.
The Galaxy S10 Android 10 and One UI 2.0 beta program is currently underway in South Korea, Germany, and the US, and Galaxy S10e, S10, and S10+ owners in other markets have been wondering whether they will get the chance to test out the One UI 2.0 beta as well. Samsung made the original One UI beta program available in quite a few countries, and we now have it on good authority that the company will do the same for the One UI 2.0 beta.
The One UI 2.0 beta program will be launched in France, Poland, Spain, the UK, India, and China in the near future, for both the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10 series. These are the same markets where the Android Pie-based One UI beta was launched last year for the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9. The Galaxy S10 5G will also be getting an Android 10 beta, but it will only be available in South Korea. We have not been told if Galaxy Note 10+ 5G owners will be able to participate, but we hope they do. After all, the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G is more widely available than the Galaxy S10 5G and also is pretty much the same device as the LTE variant of the Galaxy Note 10+.
Samsung hasn’t revealed a date for when the beta program for the Galaxy S10 series will expand to the markets mentioned above, nor when the Galaxy Note 10 beta will kick off. Samsung’s customer representatives have said that the Note 10 beta should start on October 21, and if that turns out to be accurate, we can expect the Galaxy S10 beta program to get a wider launch on the same day. However, nothing is final until Samsung makes an official announcement.
Samsung and Reliance Jio Infocomm have teamed up to offer a taste of 5G networking at the India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019 in New Delhi, just one week after Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong visited India, presumably for 5G-related discussions. At IMC 2019, the two companies aim to demonstrate how 5G technologies can benefit consumers and enterprises alike.
In addition, Samsung and Jio are also showcasing new use cases for the existing 4G infrastructure which can technically be used for what could become India’s Emergency Communication Network or “OneNet.”
A glimpse of 5G at IMC 2019
Samsung and Jio are showcasing 5G NSA (non-stand-alone) networking through two demonstrations at IMC 2019. One demo called Virtual Classroom allows visitors to watch a 360-degree virtual lecture from a classroom located in Jio’s Corporate Park in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the Massive Full High-Definition Content Streaming demonstration highlights 4K video streaming on multiple 5G tablets simultaneously.
The demos will be performed using Samsung’s 5G product portfolio including its 5G Massive MIMO Unit, 28GHz Access Unit (AU) and CEP device, as well as its virtualized radio access (vRAN) and core.
4G LTE could be used for India’s Emergency Communication Network
Samsung is going to play a big role in the expansion of 5G into India, but the existing 4G LTE infrastructure it helped build over the past decade could also become a part of India’s Emergency Communication Network.
Samsung and Jio will do a live demonstration of “public safety network over LTE” (PS-LTE) at IMC 2019, boasting Mission-Critical-Push-To-X (MCPTX) communication. Public Safety LTE (PS-LTE) using MCPTX opens up a lot more possibilities for first responders to connect in a “geo-fenced” environment. While legacy technologies are limited to voice communications, PS-LTE supports multicast technology allowing multi-lateral voice and video-based communications.
2020 is said to be the year of 5G, in the sense that the technology will become more mainstream and more 5G-enabled devices across multiple price points will be developed and released. So far, Samsung appears to have secured 5G clients across numerous markets – including Japan – and is seemingly in a very favorable position regarding its 5G market share.
With Android 10 and One UI 2.0, Samsung is adding plenty of new features to its devices, and many of them will be easily visible for users after they have updated to the new version of Android. But there will also be new functionality that will be less easy to spot, and falling in that category are two new features that Samsung has added to face recognition.
Add an alternative look, and keep your eyes open!
The first of these is the ability to add an alternative look. Face recognition with the front camera is not a very accurate biometric tool. And unlike fingerprints, Galaxy phones only allow adding one person’s face for use with face recognition. That makes a lot of sense, considering face recognition isn’t very secure. But what if your phone doesn’t recognize you because, say, you recently grew a beard but were clean-shaven when you initially set up face recognition? That’s the kind of scenario where the option to add an alternative appearance should help.
The other new feature is the option to force the phone to only recognize you when your eyes are open. This should make face recognition more secure, especially when it comes to someone being able to take a picture of your face and use that to unlock your device. However, this feature seems to be a work-in-progress as it clashes with the existing “faster recognition” setting that speeds up face recognition by letting the phone recognize you with your eyes closed, so it may or may not make it to the final version of Android 10.
You will find both new features in the face recognition section of the Biometrics and security menu of the Galaxy S10’s Settings app. We can’t exactly say if either of them makes a difference in day-to-day usage just yet, but feel free to test them out and let us know how they work for you! Also look forward to more on the new stuff that One UI 2.0 and Android 10 bring to the Galaxy S10 lineup (and other Galaxy devices) in the coming days through our One UI 2.0 feature focus series of articles.
Samsung Electronics has announced that it will begin deploying Samsung POS worldwide starting today in Canada and expanding availability to other markets in 2020. The company has partnered with Mobeewave for its NFC-based contactless payment acceptance solution on mobile devices.
For those unaware, Samsung POS is a mobile-based Point of Sale (POS) solution that enables merchants to accept payments by tapping contactless debit and credit cards, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay wallets onto NFC-enabled Samsung devices without any additional hardware.
“We’re excited to launch this solution with our strategic partner, Mobeewave. Their patented contactless payment processing platform is the only mobile-based solution accepting Mastercard, Visa and Interac transactions in pilot in Canada,” said Sunny Park, VP and Head of Service Operation Group, Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “Their proprietary technology allows us to launch this new solution on a global scale,” he added.
The Galaxy Fold has been released in a lot more markets over the past month. Samsung has been offering the device in limited quantities and it has been selling out almost everywhere. The company has managed the roll out well and may now be planning to make more units than it had originally thought.
According to a report out of South Korea, Samsung Display is ramping up the production of foldable display panels since the Galaxy Fold has been selling really well. If the company feels that it can end up selling more units than first planned, it would obviously make sense to do that.
Galaxy Fold has been selling out fairly quickly
The report mentions that Samsung Display had planned to produce 67,000 foldable display panels last month after making 40,000 in August. However, the company made 92,000 panels, a 40 percent increase over the original target.
As the Galaxy Fold continues to sell out, Samsung would want to maintain the momentum by fully operating the manufacturing lines for foldable displays. It’s now expected to produce 102,000 panels in October and 99,000 in November. It can reportedly make 3,300 foldable panels every single day and if these targets are to be hit, Samsung Display will have to keep the manufacturing lines running at full speed for the next few months.
Demand for the Galaxy Fold will taper off eventually. The controlled manner in which Samsung is releasing the device has helped increase sales. Rarity is always a good tactic to employ and Samsung had done that very well.
For most of us, the television is the center of the living room, and we spend an average of nearly four hours every day in front of our TV. When you spend that much time sitting opposite your TV, you want the best possible picture quality as well as smart features so that you don’t need additional hardware, like a Chromecast, to watch Netflix. Right now, you can get all that with the Samsung’s 43″ UHD 7 Series TV at 24% off its regular price. It’s a 4K TV that can upscale standard definition content to 4K, has HDR for brighter picture with higher dynamic range, and has plenty of smart features to get you a solid all-round experience.
It’s a great deal if you’re looking to upgrade your current setup, so hit the Buy Now button below to get the TV while it’s still discounted.
Samsung’s newest YouTube video telling everyone why they should buy the company’s QLED doesn’t seem like an advertisement at first glance. Titled TV burn-in checker, it comes off as an educational video that starts off showing the words “What is burn-in” being typed in to a Google search field, with the autocomplete options showing “OLED TV burn-in” as the first result. The video then shows multiple red images with dark patches, telling the viewer that burn-in is those dark patches they see on the screen, and finally ends with suggesting they contact customer care or “get a burn-in free QLED.”
It’s a clever marketing technique, but it’s not the first time that Samsung has targeted the burn-in problems associated with OLED TVs (and OLED displays in general) to show why consumers should opt for its QLED televisions. Many believe this is part of a campaign to call out LG without explicitly naming its local competitor. While Samsung has been the biggest proponent of AMOLED displays on smartphones and has single-handedly helped make them the de facto standard, it missed the OLED boat when it comes to televisions and has instead put all its resources into QLED technology.
LG has focused on OLED tech for its TVs, and that has also brought the burn-in issue to the fore, with many tests showing LG’s OLED TVs don’t stand up to the company’s claims about how long the TVs can be used without burn-in becoming a problem. Samsung has used it to take multiple indirect digs at LG with videos such as the one you see below, and it’s something the company will no doubt continue to do in the future.
Do you own a Samsung QLED TV, or do you have an OLED TV from LG or another manufacturer?
A customer representative has revealed in the Samsung online community in Germany that Smart Switch cannot currently help Galaxy S10 users running the Android 10 beta revert back to Android Pie without voiding the phone’s warranty. Smart Switch will reportedly be updated in the next week or so to allow users to go back to Android Pie without issues, but for now, you’re stuck on Android 10 if you have participated in the beta program and have installed the beta update that Samsung released earlier this week.
For those unaware, Samsung phones come with a hardware fuse that is tripped anytime the device detects that unofficial software has been installed, and that instantly voids the device’s warranty. This was a precaution the Korean giant implemented on its phones a few years ago when it started taking device security seriously to make inroads into the enterprise world and enable features like Secure folder and was mostly supposed to stop users from installing custom ROMs.
And, right now, the hardware fuse will also be tripped if Smart Switch is used to revert from Android 10 to Android Pie. It’s not clear why Samsung isn’t communicating this issue via the notices section of the Samsung Members app where it would be more visible. But, if you were thinking of going back to Android Pie using Smart Switch, you should refrain from doing so and wait for further information.
How do I check if my warranty is void?
If you have already downgraded to Pie using Smart Switch and want to know if your device’s warranty fuse has been tripped, you can download our SamMobile Device Info app from the Play Store and check what it says in front of the KNOX warranty bit field in the General section (see screenshot below). Your warranty is fine if it says 0x0, but if it’s 0x1, then your warranty has been void.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to reset warranty if the fuse has been tripped. So, if Smart Switch currently is messing up the warranty for Galaxy S10 beta owners trying to get back to Android Pie, we hope the company comes out with a clearer stance on the issue instead of making a post about it in its forums that not everyone may come across.
The Galaxy Note 8 may not be eligible for the Android 10 and One UI 2.0 update, but it’s still getting regular security patches, and Samsung has now released the October 2019 security patch for the device. An update with software version N950FXXU7DSJ1 is rolling out in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states, and like all recent updates for the Note 8, this one doesn’t bring any new features or improvements other than enhanced security.
The October 2019 security patch includes a fix for a serious vulnerability that was discovered to have been exploited by the NSO, an Israeli cyber intelligence firm. However, it’s not clear if Samsung is including the fix in the security patch it is rolling out to Galaxy devices, as the fix was released by Google separately instead of being included in the regular October patch release. It’s also unclear if the fix is even needed for devices that weren’t singled out by Google analysts when the vulnerability was first discovered – the only Galaxy phones mentioned were the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S8, and Galaxy S9.
The latest Galaxy Note 8 update is available over the air and can be downloaded on the phone from the Settings » Software update menu. You can also update via Samsung Smart Switch or by downloading the latest firmware from our database and flashing it manually on your Note 8 using a Windows PC.
For long-time users of Galaxy smartphones, the Galaxy Note 10 brings two substantial hardware changes. One is the lack of a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and the other is the position of the power button. The Galaxy Note 10’s power button is on the left side of the device, right below the volume buttons, and that requires one to forego an old habit if they have been using Galaxy devices for a few years.
The Galaxy Note 10/10+ isn’t the first smartphone on which Samsung has changed the position of the power or volume buttons. The company has been putting both the volume and power buttons on the right side of its budget and mid-range devices launched in the last year or so. The Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ are just the first devices in Samsung’s repertoire to have all the buttons placed on the left frame.
Basically, the layout is new no matter if you have used flagship, mid-range, or budget Galaxy phones in the past. It’s also an issue for those who have used a phone with a dedicated Bixby key. The power button on the Galaxy Note 10 is exactly where the Bixby key would be if Samsung hadn’t ditched it altogether. And anyone who, on a previous device, had the Bixby key assigned to launch an app other than Bixby with a single press has no doubt pressed the power button out of force of habit on their Note 10/10+ every now and then.
In short, there’s a learning curve involved in adjusting to the power button placement for long-time Galaxy smartphone users, and this learning curve can be small or big depending on an individual. And here’s what we want to know in this poll: Does it bother you that the power button is on the left side of your Note 10 or Note 10+? Have you gotten used to it, and if yes, did it take you long to stop reaching for the right frame of the phone to access the power button?
Vote in the poll below, then take to the comments section to discuss your thoughts in detail with other readers!
Results: A change in the position of a button on a phone may not be as simple as some think, as 25 percent of voters said they still haven’t gotten used to the new power button placement on the Galaxy Note 10/10+. 29 percent were able to get used to it on day one, while 31 percent got used to it in a few days. 7 percent of voters found themselves taking a long time to adjust, while the remaining 7 percent voters love the new placement as they’re left-handed.
Does it bother you that the Galaxy Note 10 power button is on the left?
It did initially, but I got used to it in a few days 31%, 327 votes
327 votes31%
327 votes - 31% of all votes
Got used to it on day one 29%, 307 votes
307 votes29%
307 votes - 29% of all votes
Still haven't gotten used to it 25%, 262 votes
262 votes25%
262 votes - 25% of all votes
Took me considerable time, but I got over it eventually 7%, 75 votes
75 votes7%
75 votes - 7% of all votes
I'm left-handed, so it's perfect for me 7%, 72 votes
