Samsung – Brian.Carnell.Com

Never Buy Sandisk SD Cards

This is an interesting article about a photographer who has sworn off Sandisk SD cards because of their shoddy construction.

Unfortunately, I’m done buying Sandisk SD cards. and I think you can see why. They seem to be more flimsy than any other memory card (make or model) I have ever had. Inevitably, they split open and spill their memory chip guts.
. . .
Considering that I am now at 5-10 Sandisk cards with the exact same type of failure, I can only conclude that Sandisk cards are significantly less well-made than the other brands I’ve been using.

The article includes several photographs showing SanDisk cards that have fallen apart.

This has been my experience as well. I haven’t bought any Sandisk cards since 2015 because the ones I did purchase would all fall apart in exactly the way shown in the photo above.

I finally gave up and switched to purchasing Samsung cards that have held up much better and seem less likely to fail for other reasons.

Stop Using Stock Samsung Apps

Android Police has an article complaining about Samsung foisting ads on users in the default applications.

On the one hand, yes, absolutely. Samsung is greedy scum for adding adds to the stock phone app on a device that a user paid $1000+ for. Samsung should absolutely get rid of these ads and be ashamed that they were there in the first place.

On the other hand, might I suggest a possible solution–stop using Samsung’s apps anytime you can avoid it. Replace all those lousy stock apps with far superior replacements from the Google Play Store.

Samsung’s hardware is awesome, but its software is buggy, poorly engineered, and is not consumer-friendly, to say the least. Avoid it at all costs.

Samsung Promises Fail-In-Place/’Never Die’ SSDs

Samsung is planning to create SSDs equipped with what it calls “fail-in-place technology” that will protect the drives from traditional failure methods.

Samsung’s FIP technology marks a new milestone in the 60-year history of storage by ensuring that SSDs maintain normal operation even when errors occur at the chip level, enabling a never-dying SSD for the first time in the industry. In the past, failure in just one out of several hundred NAND chips meant having to replace an entire SSD, causing system downtime and additional drive replacement cost. SSDs integrated with Samsung’s FIP software can detect a faulty chip, scan for any damage in data, then relocate the data into working chips. For instance, if a fault is identified in any of the 512 NAND chips inside a 30.72TB SSD, the FIP software would automatically activate error-handling algorithms at the chip level while maintaining the drive’s high, stable performance.

This technology will initially be available primarily on SSDs intended for data centers, but hopefully it will eventually find its way into consumer-level drives.

Fooling The Samsung Galaxy S10 Ultrasonic Fingerprint Scanner

Someone has put up a post on imgur claiming to demonstrate unlocking a Galaxy S10 by 3d printing a fingerprint based on an image of the fingerprint,

First I simply took a photograph of my fingerprint on the side of a wine glass. I used my smartphone to take this picture, but it’s certainly not out of the question to use a long focal length DSLR camera to snag a fingerprint image from across a room…or further.
I then pulled the image into Photoshop and increased the contrast, and created an alpha mask.
I exported that over to 3ds Max and created a geometry displacement from the Photoshop image which gave me a raised 3d model of every last detail of the fingerprint.
I popped that model into the 3D printing software and began to print it. This was printed using an AnyCubic Photon LCD resin printer, which is accurate down to about 10 microns (in Z height, 45 microns in x/y), which is more than enough detail to capture all of the ridges in a fingerprint.

As the author of the post notes, if a smartphone is stolen, it is likely that a fingerprint of the owner will be found on the phone itself (especially if the user is repeatedly touching a specific area of the screen to unlock it, as someone using the ultrasonic fingerprint reader would be doing).

Samsung Introducing 12W Wireless Charging With Galaxy S10

It looks like Samsung is introducing 12 Watt Fast Charge 2.0 wireless charging with the Galaxy S10 line of phones. Other Samsung phones, like my Galaxy Note 9, top out at 7.5W fast charging.

In general, I use wireless charging for about 90 percent of my phone charging needs. Typically I only resort to wired charging when the battery is relatively low and I need the phone recharged quickly prior to an extended time away from any charging source (such as a long meeting).

As it did with the release of the Galaxy Note 9, Samsung is releasing a Duo Pad wireless charger that charges phones up to 12W on the left, and another phone or Samsung smart watch on the right. Companies like Anker apparently already make wireless charging pads capable of delivering up to 15W over wireless, so looks like I’ll be switching out all of my wireless pads once the Galaxy Note 10 gets released later this summer.

Maybe someday Samsung’s software will catch up to its hardware (instead we’re likely to be seeing them trying to make Bixby a thing until the end of time).

Consumer SSD Prices and Sizes

It’s interesting to see how quickly the per/gigabyte price for SSDs continues to fall as companies begin introducing bigger and cheaper models.

Back in February 2018, I bought a couple 2TB SSDs for some new laptops for about $500/each. Today, ten months later, those SSDs can be had on Amazon for $290, a 42 percent price drop in less than a year.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently announced consumer level QLC SSDs in 1TB/2TB/4TB capacities that will initially retail for $149.99, $299.99, and $599.99 respectively.

Aside from the relatively low prices, one of the interesting things about the QLC drives is their write endurance,

The 860 QVO, from the box, is given a write endurace rating equivalent to 0.3 Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD), which even for the 1TB means 300GB a day, every day, which goes above and beyond most consumer workloads.

Better drives, larger capacities and cheaper storage prices. What’s not to love?