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USA, no tax:

Galaxy S7 $669.99

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-s/samsung-galaxy-s7--32gb---unlocked---black-onyx-sm-g930uzkaxaa/

Galaxy S7 Edge $769.99

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-s/samsung-galaxy-s7-edge--32gb---unlocked---silver-titanium-sm-g935uzsaxaa/

iPhone 6s $549.00

http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone6s/4.7-inch-display-32gb-silver#00,20,30,40,60

iPhone 6s Plus $649.00

http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone6s/5.5-inch-display-32gb-silver#01,20,30,40,60

Except that Samsung didn't do an official recall until Sept 15.

http://www.samsung.com/us/note...

Apparently the recall isn't worldwide. Samsung Japan for instance still has the Galaxy Note 7 on its front page and nary a mention of a recall. Not sure if thats because the phones shipped to Japan don't have the defective batteries or if they aren't pulling anything until forced to.

It'd be even better with a washing machine.

Well, in fact Samsung washing machines have been catching on fire. So make sure you return it if you own an affected model.

Well apparently nobody told Samsung this.

http://www.samsung.com/ca/sams...

" I don't know where Samsung stands on innovation" -

Well they make the displays for everyone's phones (except LG, LG like Samsung makes displays for everyone) think OLED, They make and develop memory, They have their own ARM SoC as well as having the ability to fab their own chips.
In 2014 Samsung was the #2 spender on R&D in the world, just a hair behind VW. They spent over $14 Billion USD on R&D in 2015. Compare that to Apple who spent $8.5 Billion.

Take memory, they are the first to produce 10nm ddr4 memory. https://news.samsung.com/globa...

When it comes to innovation Samsung is the biggest spender in Tech.

Doesn't offer the variety? You are aware that right now you can by 5 different iPhones each of which have 2-3 options for the amount of internal storage. How is that dissimilar from the 27 phones from Samsung? Note that the 27 "different" phones are really just different storage and carrier.

If we compared ALL Galaxy phones (S series 1-7 and so on) to ALL iPhones (1-6, c, se, plus, and so on) as this count is saying. I would think that Samsung would be in the lead. Hell, just look at global marketshare lead to see Samsung phones have just shy of double the global market share of iPhones. Even at 55% of Samsungs phones being Galaxy phones, they'd still win.

Many. The Samsung Galaxy S6 for example has hardware accelerated VP9 video. Hardware accelerated VP9 encoding and decoding is now a standard feature in ARM's video platform.

Their own website claims of the s7 Active:

Water-resistant in up to 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes; rinse residue/dry after wet. This device passed military specification (MIL-STD-810G) testing against a subset of 20 specific environmental conditions, including temperature, dust, shock/vibration, and low pressure/high altitude. Device may not perform as shown in all extreme conditions. See user manual.

So yeah, they claimed it can take a 30 minute soak in 5' of water. It's a valid test.

I just upgraded from the S4 to the S7 and it's by far the best phone I've had.

Umm, ok. Great. Sounding a little fanboi-ish but fair enough. One would hope that the new version was better than the old version or else what is the point of it?

Samsung pay is accepted 95% of the places I use it.

Really? You shop exclusively at these retailers? 1/3 of those retailers I've never even heard of much less shop at. Or are you saying that despite it being supposedly accepted at those places the transaction goes through 95% of the time you try to use it? Either way not much to get excited about.

The camera is almost perfect for a point and shoot. Its the first phone camera that is concisider good enough for photography use.

Smartphone cameras have been good enough for point and shoot photography for quite a while now. If you felt they weren't either you are a snob about your photography or you weren't paying attention. There is a reason sales of point and shoot cameras have fallen off a cliff in recent years.

Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

Looking at the pictures of the Samsung UFS card underside, it rather looks like the card dimensions would be able to support UFS and SD pins (but not UHS-II). The cards in question only have pins for UFS. That is assuming the mechanical dimensions for the cards are identical.

Or it's possible that it's only meant to support a reader slot that can read both.

Link to the picture

That and the fact that if you hold your credit card-like iPhone just the right way, it would just vibrate and use your skull as a speaker.

Yeah, pretty sure you're right about h265 on the RPi -- it does h264, VC1 and MPEG2 with hardware decode. (I think the RPi2 is fast enough to do MPEG2 in software, not sure though.)

I have an Odroid C1 (not C1+), but I never got it working as smoothly as I wanted. I think h265 worked, IIRC, but I had problems with audio passthrough, MPEG2 stuttering, and I think some of my BD rips (either h264 or VC1, can't recall) likewise had some jitter. Plus, the HDMI-CEC support never worked for me...though maybe I should dust it off and give it another shot -- haven't played with it in some time. I guess I know what I'm doing tonight... :)

As a parting aside, I also find it mildly ridiculous that some high end TVs still include built-in audio (see, for instance, Samsung's UN88JS9500FXZA). If you're spending ~$20k on a TV, you'd think you would use your own surround sound receiver+speakers...

The display swap takes a competent technician 10 minutes to perform.

You're full of shit. And I have repaired MANY devices. From "put it on the bench" to "wipe your fingerprints off it and give it back" takes a minimum of 30-45 minutes. And that's if you've done that particular model several times before.

And of course, ESTIMATED BOM costs have little to do with retail price.

Wanna run that same estimate on a top-of-the-line Samsung phablet? You'll find a similar story. And how much will Sammy charge to non-warranty replace that display on an S7? Oh, wait: They simply WON'T.

Now what?

Even worse, they want your fridge as well. http://www.samsung.com/us/appl...
http://www.cnet.com/news/touchscreen-refrigerators-and-talking-everything-at-ces-2016/

Samsung already made a 15TB SSD so the demand is presumably there, at least in the enterprise space. Really makes you wonder how much longer spinning disks will be around. 10 years? 20? If Moore's law keeps up, in 20 years we'd have another 13 iterations of Moore's law (lets pretends its not dead now, or by then).

You can get a 1TB SSD for $255 (or less) today from several real name brand manufacturers. That means after 13 iterations of doubling transistor density, we'd have 8,192TB SSD (someone double check my math please). I'm sure there are lots of other issues, like how can we really have that many die shrinks and heat and a million other factors, but I seriously doubt we'll see HDD competing for anything near 20 more years.

I carry a Samsung Gusto flip phone, and have for several years now. It does what I need it to do quietly and efficiently. I have to take a laptop and hot spot with me everywhere to cover for work so I don't need, or want a smart phone. I have an in car GPS system, and work pays for the laptop and hotspot so I do quite well with a small well protected flip phone in my pocket.

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobi...

Not always. They're probably not doing themselves any favours with their inconsistent naming conventions.

NVMe is making its arrival to PCs as well. Apple is just often among the first to adopt the coolest and most fresh hi-tech.

If by "among the first" you mean later than Dell and pretty much at the same time as Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and every other first tier motherboard manufacturer.

Search this list for laptops which had the interface well before Apple introduced it in their line.

Among the first... more like among the all.

Let's hope Samsung has fixed their broken IPv6 implementation that drops all IPv6 packets when the screen is off.

Newer Samsung phones are DROPPING any IPv6 packet (not just RAs) as soon as the screen is off. (this is in the WiFi firmware so even 3rd party roms like CyanogenMod are affected).
So anything that is connected via IPv6 will be disconnected.

See this thread (the title is about ICMPv6 but later it clarifies that newer phones drop ALL IPv6 traffic): http://developer.samsung.com/forum/board/thread/view.do?boardName=General&messageId=239890

Even if they do that to save battery, there are better ways to do this and it should be configurable.

Please help and raise a stink with Samsung over this!

The disclaimer on the page http://www.samsung.com/ph/smar... says:

Voice Control performance may vary depending on language, local dialect, pronunciation, voice and ambient noise and lighting levels.

Is this a mistake? How can lighting level affect voice control performance? Or does the TV also use lip reading and also send video capture to third parties all times?

According to this page, some models do indeed listen for the phrase "Hi TV" after you enable the feature in the settings. When this is detected, a mic icon appears on the screen, and the TV will listen for and send voice data to the recognition servers while that mic icon is present. This isn't "constantly recording and sending", though.

b) You do actually have to push a button on the remote to turn it on. So it's not recording every word you say while the TV is turned on.

Note true in this case, these new TVs are always listening

New sophisticated Smart Interaction technology enables you to operate your TV without pushing a button. You can easily control functions such as turning on/off your TV, changing channels, accessing apps and navigating the web using simple voice commands.

http://www.samsung.com/ph/smar...

From Samsung's privacy policy:

In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

Emphasis mine. Check the source, people, not the clickbait blogs.

It does have built-in GPS, and, according to the reviews I've read, phone synchronization is only needed for the initial setup and for installing apps. I still wouldn't buy the Gear S even if I had a Samsung phone, because it runs a proprietary Samsung OS called Tizen - I'm not thrilled by the idea.

Samsung PRO line offers 5 years or total bytes written, whichever comes first, as a part of their warranty package:
http://www.samsung.com/global/...

While this drive "is rated to handle 32TB of writes, every day for five years without failure" - I want to see a warranty to go with that. That's ~58400TB total, about 200 times higher than their best warranty offers right now at 300TBW.

My Note 3 lasts just as long even with moderate use like watching movies on a plane etc. I bought an extra battery and battery charger kit directly from Samsung for $25 when they had a 1/2 price sale (very small actually)
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobi...

and carry it with me when I travel. I've only had to "swap" batteries twice during the day since I've had it. I'd rather have that than carry around a generic battery pack recharger hanging off my phone.

Nonsense? I used to be able to put my hand on the CPU of my PC in the early 1990s while the thing was on. Good luck doing that now. Why do you think the power supply wattage keeps going up?

How many people had Alpha workstations back then anyway? Compared to desktop PCs? But sure let's do a little comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Alpha 21264: 90W TDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Back people probably had Pentium processors: 16W TDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Recent AMD FX-9590: 220W TDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Recent Haswell-E: 140W BogoTDP (TM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh and let's not forget the GeForce GTX Titan Z GPU. Did not have that in the 1990s: 375W.

Fact is a computer is today a major power hog in a regular house.

I don't know. Maybe you use one of those integrated systems with a low-voltage processor. Even if you do I bet it draws more power than the Alpha did.

http://www.samsung.com/us/vide...
How about large screen LCDs? 245W for a 55".

http://icecat.us/en_us/p/sony/...
Back when we used CRTs we also used smaller screens. 160W for a 36".

http://opensource.samsung.com/...

As far as I can tell, most companies just ignore the "can't be patented, or must have royalty free licensing for everyone" part of the the GPL.

Their website says 10 Years or 150TBW for the 256GB model and 10 Years or 300TBW for the 1TB model. TBW is "terabytes written". Which isn't the "2 petabytes to failure" marathon test that took 6 months to complete, but 0.3 petabytes written on a 1TB drive is still a lot and way beyond normal consumer usage. My unofficial opinion is that only about 128gb is "hot" and the rest of the storage on a 1TB drive is typically "cold". Even a professional video editor is going to have trouble topping out their warranty.
 
  http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/warranty.html

We've been using Samsung drives in "non production" status servers, embedded servers, etc. and have had a terrible time of it. The first drives we bought a few years ago (840 Pro) were good, but we've seen Samsung SSDs run entirely through their write capacity (as reported by SMART) and then go dead when not even mounted! Turns out we aren't the only ones to get bit by buggy Samsung drives.

And the 10 year warranty that interest me - running a 32Gig SSD drive for a week I lost 48K of the drive.

It's or bytes written.

"Samsung guarantees the 2TB 850 Pro for 10 years or 300 terabytes written (TBW), and the 2TB 850 EVO for five years or 150 TBW.

840 Series 120GB/250GB/500GB 3 years
840 PRO Series 128GB/256GB/512GB 5 years (73 TBW for enterprise applications)"

http://www.samsung.com/global/...

Countless science papers confirm average IQ of west African blacks is far Lower than most other racial groups.

I'm curious if any such studies have followed black children adopted by white parents vs. white children adopted by black parents. Or perhaps you're just telling a Pinocchio.

A north korean descent person will not win an Olympic Sprint Race

But once you cross the border to the south, you see Samsung, the official cell phone maker of the Olympic Games. And they're on Sprint.

I really enjoy my Samsung Rugby III. http://www.samsung.com/ca/cons... It has a memo feature that is handy, a calendar, and each feature can be locked or kept open depending on your preference.

840 EVO by chance? There's a confirmed bug (with firmware update and reconditioning process) that will slow an 840 EVP to a crawl. I've personally seen it happen with several laptops recently upgraded. Once I applied the update, performance resumed back to original spec. And, these were full from anywhere from 60% to 80%; didn't matter much. Link below for update

Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software

In fact, that fix does not really FIX the problem, it just refreshes the cells (by reading/writing all the data), but then performance slowly deteriorates again. Apparently, Samsung will make a "real" fix available later this month.

http://anandtech.com/show/9158...

840 EVO by chance? There's a confirmed bug (with firmware update and reconditioning process) that will slow an 840 EVP to a crawl. I've personally seen it happen with several laptops recently upgraded. Once I applied the update, performance resumed back to original spec. And, these were full from anywhere from 60% to 80%; didn't matter much. Link below for update

Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software

When you bought your Samsung SSDs you should have known they only support Windows. All their shitty fucking awful firmware tools since the dawn of time have only run on Windows...

If you bothered to look at their download site, you'd see they support Mac in addition to Windows.

I suppose one could interpret a press release from January 7th as "Samsung has just announced its new", it was announced during CES on January 7th, here's the press release: http://www.samsung.com/global/... Linked article says model numbers haven't been released either.. here you go: 128GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZVPV128HDGL-00000 256GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZHPV256HDGL-00000 512GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZHPV512HDGL-00000 They've been shipping these in Lenovo and Apple laptops, they are scarce, but available (Amazon, RamCity, Ebay, Etc) at a little more than $1 per GB.

The (original) fix is available as an ISO and USB stick image for non-Windows machines. I used it on a Macbook Pro last month. http://www.samsung.com/global/...

No it has not. I carry a spare battery and a charger with me, it is a Samsung accessory made specifically for the Note 3, it cost me $25.

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobi...

Ebay has cheap no name knockoffs in the $10-15 range but I wanted something I could trust. The combination is very small, only slightly larger than the battery itself and definitely smaller than a "portable" all in one battery charger of equal rating. I travel a lot, although the Note 3 battery life is outstanding, there are times it does get low. I reach into my backpack, swap out the battery in about 60 seconds, and I get another 18-36 hours of life. If there is AC power nearby, I plug that device in and recharge the spare all the while never having to restrict my phone to an external power pack within reach of the cord and the outlet.

I don't have to plug something in and drag it around and keep checking trying to go from 7% to 25% so I can unplug it and use the phone again.

I'm sorry you can't see the benefit of that. You carry an external device, I carry a smaller external device, i swap in 60 seconds with a full battery, you have to hang a cable off your phone for who knows how long.

that's exactly what this is:

http://www.samsung.com/us/mobi...

and it is amazing!!

Consider industrial panels, for digital signage perhaps. They're not cheaper (in contrary) but these are rigid and simply work .. and lack the excess smart features.
Most are meant to integrate in a wall, either framed/sunken or just really flat and bolted on.

*shivers* It appears even this page has "SMART" all over it.. http://www.samsung.com/us/busi...

Samsung in fact does make solar panels:

http://www.samsung.com/us/busi...

Now, not back in 2008 "Samsung Electronics are among the largest patent holders in solar photovoltaic panels, although they have no products in the field today. By contrast, many of the world's biggest producers of solar panels hold relatively few patents on the technology."

So who's the company hoarding patents again? 'Samsung "the IP gorilla in this relatively new field."'

Samsung in fact does make solar panels:

http://www.samsung.com/us/busi...

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/us/seri...

The Series 9 is a POS (or at least it was when I was buying a new laptop a little over a year ago.) The case has a lot of flex and the keyboard terrible tactile response. Regardless of what the specs (and price) are, I don't think you can argue it's a serious contender for the high end.

Lots of flex?? That is not my experience at all, and all the major reviews I've seen have said the opposite about the build quality. We have people with both Series 9s and Macbooks here, and I absolutely think Series 9 can compare favorably to the Macbooks. I don't think Macbooks have a better keyboard either (but they do have a better trackpad). When it comes to keyboards none of them come close to the keyboard quality of ThinkPad T and W models, but they are not in the same ultraportable and design class.

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/us/seri...

The Series 9 is a POS (or at least it was when I was buying a new laptop a little over a year ago.) The case has a lot of flex and the keyboard terrible tactile response. Regardless of what the specs (and price) are, I don't think you can argue it's a serious contender for the high end.

It makes sense to me That they would create a new OS. Have you ever read their Privacy Policy?
Common http://www.samsung.com/us/comm.... I have a SamSung_HDTV_32F6300AFXZA It's a Smart TV and lots of bells and whistles as a TV or media player, but I only use it as a computer monitor due to the Privacy Policy.
Which is different than the common one, and the third one you have to agree to while setting up a HDTV.

I do take the time to read privacy policies and ToS's, of all of them SamSung's shows them as being one hell of a data collecton agency; I had thought Rovio.com (Angry Birds) was bad, it's mild in comparison. I also have a Samsung phone and knew of there policies up front, there are two play stores Google and Samsung's, I won't install anything from Samsungs. The phone is loaded with clouds and social sites, which they any collect data you post, replies, and stored items; a HDTV every keystroke or remote key pressed is recorded and kept stored, there is also the ability to add a web cam for Gestures. You know so when you yell at the kids waving your arms around the HDTV goes spastic, and Xbox was shouted out of doing the same thing.

The policies if you really read them come into full effect when you sign into Samsung.com which one has to do for support like drivers and anything else needed to "add to your (item here)'s experience". Kies for a Samsung Phone that is the utility to back up, and transfer items with; while every other company has it readily available, you have to sign in to for.
While Kies isn't really required let alone needed, most don't know that.

One line states that Samsung and it's affiliates can access your equipment and collect whatever they want, and at any time;
one can opt out of one collection site but you won't get AD's that relate to you (I laughed).

The Privacy Policy I read long before the phone or TV states if you have legal issues with Samsung, they claim jurisdiction in some province in South Korea, which you have previously agreed to.

Samsung is much like Google in that they collect everything, yet you use them.

You might want to update your brand-hate slightly.

Asus: http://www.asus.com/ca-en/Note... Toshiba: http://www.cnet.com/products/k...

Samsung I know nothing about however ...

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/us/seri...

Data sheets now days are not avalable to the public

Datasheets ARE publicly available. However, they're for the actual DRAM ICs themselves, and not of the modules.

There are only a few DRAM manufacturers out there - Samsung, Hynix, Elpida, Micron are among them.

Samsung Computing DRAM (they also have Graphics DRAM and others). Some of their newest chips don't have datasheets yet, but that'll be forthcoming. The older ones in production do, however.

Hynix

Micron (and Elpida).

These are all generally available. Since the only real difference between them is a few timing numbers, they're not generally a huge secret - it's all governed by JEDEC standards anyhow.

Memory modules are just collections of these chips so they can be generalized to what you buy in the store for your PC.

Samsung has some information about their packaging options here. But yeah, they're not SODIMM or another kind of removable socket. They're all intended for integration into a system-on-a-chip (SoC), via either surface-mount or package on package.