After last year’s exploding battery debacle, Samsung has a new Note device, the Galaxy Note 8. And according to our sister site The Verge, it’s good!
Which Android phone should I buy?
The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Essential Phone and LG’s V30 on Too Embarrassed to Ask.
Drew Angerer / Getty
But Samsung probably isn’t expecting to sell a whole lot of them, The Verge Executive Editor Dieter Bohn said on the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask.
“It’s the aspirational Samsung phone: ‘We can prove that we can make a technically amazing device that everybody’s going to want,’” he said. “They’ll walk into the store, they’ll look at this thing and then they’ll wind up buying the [Samsung Galaxy] S8 instead.”
“It’s a technically impressive phone: It looks great, it has the stylus,” Bohn added. “They can pound their chest and say, ‘We made a phone with the most features,’ everything you can possibly do with a phone. You can stick it into a dock and it turns into a whole damn computer! Which it can do! Nobody does that. But Samsung can say that it’s possible.”
If you retain nothing else from this podcast, though, it should be this:
“Do not buy a phone right now!” Bohn said. “Just super don’t. Wait until you’ve seen everything, the rest of these announcements, at least Apple and Google.”
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On the new podcast, Bohn also discussed the Essential Phone and the LG V30 with Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode. Essential’s camera is subpar for the price, but the launch has been more significantly marred by an embarrassing privacy breach.
“They’re a relatively tiny startup, so they had some problems launching,” Bohn said. “They had some customers that they didn’t know if they were real or fraud, so they did the thing that small companies do: ‘Prove that you’re real, send me a picture of your driver’s license.’ That’s not a great thing to do customer service-wise, but it’s not wildly unheard of.”
“What is wildly unheard-of is the email they had everybody reply to turned out to be a group email,” he added. “Something around 70 people ended up sending pictures of their driver’s licenses to each other.”
Have questions about Android phones that we didn’t get to in this episode? Tweet them to @Recode with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed, or email them to TooEmbarrassed@recode.net.
(And if you’re holding out for an Apple device, stay tuned — we’ll be talking about Apple’s September 12 product event next week on Too Embarrassed to Ask!)
Be sure to follow @LaurenGoode, @KaraSwisher and @Recode to be alerted when we’re looking for questions about a specific topic.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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