Gadgetory

this week Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S 10 and the S 10 plus and also an S 10 II and probably a 5g phone and they're probably gonna show off a foldable phone - and maybe some smartwatches yeah it's a lot and I'm sure they're all gonna 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 S 9 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 9pi on the Galaxy S 9 and it has this new interface called one UI and I gotta tell you it's 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 you're 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 heart attempt to clean up Android then they dial it back then they go super neon trihard 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 you barely even notice it and that's the difference a gimmick says hey look at me look at me and the big new thing but a feature just makes your phone better without you having to think about it or even surely 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 this other crap on it that you don't really need or like or even want but did you know it didn't actually start on an Android it started as a Windows Mobile skin yeah it's that old and so here's the thing I can't believe I'm doing this but I'm gonna 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 gonna say it the design of TouchWiz lacked taste it was just kind of ugly it's not very elegant and on the galaxy s3 guess what it did by default it made this bloop knows every time you touched it boop boop come on bloop oh and Samsung had heard that you like features so 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 though is that Samsung did have the right idea I just did a horrible job of executing on it and what was trying to fix all that it attached a whole lot of other bad ideas on top of the first bad ideas 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 it sounds like the worst fan name ever but now they have this new thing which they're calling 1ui let's talk about skins 1ui isn't really a skin because there's no such thing as pure Android anymore not in the 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 and Samsung Apps they beat Google to it and it's really nice I think the s10 software is gonna be a lot like the one you I experienced 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 9pi 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 how 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 but 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 it's Samsung you do got to chill out with a 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 everybody thanks for watching have you checked out one UI and let me don't you think down in the comments also stay tuned to the verge we're gonna have hands-on zand live blogs and everything for Samsung's unpacked event on February 20th