Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

So, I recognize that I'm not like most here, but maybe that gives me "the Emperor has no clothes" view of all this. I have to say that I'm not at all impressed with Android or Google Play. First, the UI isn't all that great. The gestures are not all intuitive, and sometimes are the opposite. (For example, why does holding my finger still on a zoomed page mean "zoom back out" when there's another gesture that I understand that will do the same thing?)

Second, 4G isn't available a lot of places I go, and I live in one of the 20 biggest cities in the U.S. Surfing the web on a Samsung phone feels a lot like surfing the web using Windows 98 over a 56k phone line 15 years ago.

Third, more than half the time when I download apps from Google Play, the download fails and I have to retry. Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all - 9 apps recently) - which brings me back to the slowness and unreliability of downloading generally. And I now have to dive into the details of how to unlock the thing so I can remove the apps I don't want and don't use, taking the risk of bricking the handset. I don't want to know this stuff. I have enough stuff I have to know.

Fourth or fifth or wherever I am, the app store is messy and the apps want permissions I can see no good reason to give them. (For instance, why would a calculator app need access to my f'ing phonebook?)

I welcome any and all competition to the way things are now. The smartphone world right now feels a lot like AOL in the late '90s. "Oh, no one's going to leave Google or iOS when they have all these cool apps they paid money for!" That's bull and the handset manufacturers and phone companies and OS / app store owners know it, which is why they made unlocking phones illegal.

As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS on it that still works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity. (Too bad the BSD folks aren't too interested. The entire phone network was built on UNIX (TM). Should be a relatively simple thing to make it work.) And as soon as someone makes an app store accessible to anyone regardless of phone OS, people will go there to get apps for their OS. The walled garden play has been tried before and inevitably fails in the end because people want control of their devices.

This is one of the communities that should be making it happen, but what I hear mostly is "Oh, it can't be done! You don't know how hard it is!" There are a lot of us waiting for someone to break the oligarchies that have sprung up to take control of this market. Please do it. You might even get rich in the process.

The HN gods banned me for saying bad things about Google, but I have one word for you: antitrust.

I have a friend that always said that "Samsung can't do software" and I thought that was a bit hyperbolic. Samsung is a huge company and just because one parts screws up doesn't mean, well, anything really.

But I guess I just had barely used any samsung devices that required software. I can honestly not mention a single piece of samsung software or device that wasn't seriously hindered by the software. From TVs that show hideous grey bars (when the aspect ratio doesn't match) that will blind you in dark scenes (just because the TV frame is grey (note that you can't even change this in the menus)) instead of black bars like all other TVs, to well, TouchWiz...

Take the sound notification you got in samsung phones (was this around the time of galaxy SII? (and not the 90's that you'd expect)) where the phone would make a sound notification when the battery was charged to 100%. With no way to turn it off. I dare say the most common use case when charging a phone is during the night, a lot of people have their phone alongside their bed and this meant that they would be waken a few hours later.

All samsung devices with software in it has at least a few of these annoyances that makes it obvious - no one, has ever, used this thing outside of a lab.

But that's just small details.

TouchWiz is horribly slow. No, it really is catastrophically bad. I tested the Galaxy tab 10.1 in a few stores, in everyone the interface was seriously slower than any of the competitors (with the same hardware). But I figured that this was because of people installing and abusing demo devices. Then I was to help a friend with their brand new tab 10.1, I even witnessed the unpacking and out of the box and it was just as horrid as in all the stores. The brand new top of the line $500 tablet behaved as a bloated, cheap, first generation device. And it hasn't gotten better with time.

Samsung completely ruined the Galaxy S. Compare it to the Nexus S, pretty much the same hardware and the Galaxy S was by comparison barely usable unless you installed a custom rom on it. At which point it suddenly became a great phone.

The touchwiz calendar and messaging applications (in galaxy SIII) looks like they have been designed by a 10-year old starting to learn photoshop (seriously, I just can't believe my eyes everytime i use a Samsung android phone). The UI isn't even remotely consistent with... anything.

Everything they tweaked and touched has been for the worse. Yes they have their own features, mostly features that are fun the first five minutes (if you are a ten year old) but at best doesn't annoy you after the first week.