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Backwards S-Pen Can Permanently Damage Note 5
tlhIngan writes: Samsung recently released a new version of its popular Galaxy Note series phablet, the Note 5. However, it turns out that there is a huge design flaw in the design of its pen holder (which Samsung calls the S-pen). If you insert it backwards (pointy end out instead of in), it's possible for it get stuck damaging the S-pen detection features. While it may be possible to fix it (Ars Technica was able to, Android Police was not), there's also a chance that your pen is also stuck the wrong way in permanently as the mechanism that holds the pen in grabs the wrong end and doesn't let go.
This is a perfect example of over-engineering; designing something for flash rather than functionality. It reminds me of the Tesla and people getting locked out of their cars because someone thought it would be a good idea to have retracting door handles (complete with all the moving parts that can break down).
What is wrong with a simple slot for the pen? Why do you need an ejection mechanism? All that does is add unnecessary parts and over complicate the design.
You are holding it wrong.
So ... "you're holding it wrong" for the win?
Nope, not a bad industrial design, but it's pilot error.
In the real world, humans aren't always going to do these things as you envisioned them. If you can't design to account for this stuff, you're doing it wrong.
Like in software QA you pretty much try to do everything you shouldn't just to see what happens ... in this kind of design, you give it to someone who is going to try every thing your engineers have said "nobody would ever do that", and find out just how badly they've done.
If it shouldn't be put in that way, you should probably ensure it physically can't be put in that way without a hammer. Because someone will do it wrong.
Sorry, but the human monkey seldom acts according to the idealized assumptions of engineers and product designers. Which means you should be assuming your assumptions are wrong.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I verified on my Galaxy Note 3, I am unable to insert the S-Pen backwards
I'm using a Note 4, so I just tried it.
Surprisingly, yes it is possible to stick the pen in backwards. It wouldn't have been difficult at all to make the grabber nub on the top of it too big to fit down the shaft. I'm not sure why they didn't bother to do that. Of course I wasn't stilly enough to try to force it down all the way to duplicate the issue (sorry folks).
That being said, I never use the pretend pen. I'm not even sure what apps it would work with. For taking actual notes, I use an 11 inch pad. So I'm not sure how many actual users this will be a big issue for. However, I believe Samsung S6+ has the same size display, so perhaps people who don't care about the pen will all be buying that instead now, and *all* (both) remaining Note users will be pen users.
Um, they've designed around that. The diesel nozzle is larger than a gas nozzle.
Can you do it the other way around? Yes.
Don't give it to a young child and don't be dumb enough to stick it in backwards. Should my car manufacturer be held responsible for my gas powered vehicle's inability to run diesel? Non-story.
Oh, if we're going with a car analogy - let's use a seatbeat instead of fuel. Would you be annoyed that inserting the seatbelt clip the wrong way round meant you couldn't release it and you had to cut the seatbelt to get out?
Have to agree. We have no stories about people actually doing this by accident - just someone emulating stupidity. Fuck me... science.
If it does turn out to be a real problem, cue the fans boys on other side of the fence with "You're sticking it in wrong" jokes.
Man, this is turning out to be a dumb century.
Your analogy is broken.
Gasoline powered vehicles run on diesel. It won't be pretty, but they run. Its diesel cars that run on gasoline.
A better analogy would be: If I put my car in reverse while going forward, should the car manufacturer be held responsible for me destroying my car?
But even that analogy is broken since cars (at least here) have had mechanisms to prevent accidentally putting the car in reverse for decades.
This Note 5 flaw is an ENGINEERING flaw pure and simple.
Whatever moron designed it forgot to put in safeguards to prevent an easy mistake that can permanently damage the device.
There is a huge design flaw with cars - they tend to break when driving through walls.
I can see that most of the comments are referring to this as a design flaw and overly complicating the product but I imagine this was put into the Product Requirements Document as a feature that provided some benefit to the customer.
The issue really is, what was the testing protocol put in place, I would think that with something like this, the Samsung engineers would have to check for:
- The S-Pen being put in backwards and twisted to the preferred orientation
- The S-Pen being damaged and put in the right way and backwards and turned away from its preferred orientation
- Something other than the S-Pen being put in.
- The S-Pen being inserted with the force of a jackhammer
- The Galaxy being dropped (on all of its axis) with the S-Pen inserted correctly and incorrectly
- etc.
These tests should have been part of the product test and qualification plan.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Your car is a perfect example of the many of hundreds of ways a system is designed to prevent someone from doing something wrong.
Modern cars are interlocked so you can't start the engine while the car is not in park / neutral, can't remove the key while the car isn't in park, can't put it into park while rolling, doesn't leave the lights or indicators on when the car isn't on, doesn't turn the interior light on when the car door isn't open, or automatically turns it off when you lock the door.
Best of all, no you can't put diesel in your car without doing something incredibly stupid in most countries as the physical nozzle used in diesel is designed to not fit into the fill point of a petrol car.
I can't lock the keys in my car as the door will unlock when closed, we provide child safety features to prevent doors from locking, override controls on windows, many convertibles will not allow you to move the roof while the car is in motion, and don't forget the many other features like warning lights or noises when you do something like not buckle up.
Car manufacturers have gotten to this point through regulations and court cases. Many of these cases they have lost and that is precisely why companies need to design for the possibility that their products may actually end up in the hands of an idiot. Samsung clearly didn't get this memo.
This sounds like the VP manager of the divisions yelled "Just do it!"
That would be in keeping with what was reported by one of SF's top independent design firms (ideo?) mere days after Steve Jobs showed the iPhone in Jan 2007.
A large Asian firm contacted the design firm asked it if it could design them a touch phone. And, they wanted the complete design in 6 weeks. The design firm said no one can do that. The Asian customer went elsewhere.
Managers should manage the company, unless they are product designers by trade and work as such.
But the gas one fits into the diesel tank. In the the states that required the gas attendants fill the tanks, they filled my mom's diesel engine with unleaded. That sure messed up our road trip.
They seriously didn't see this happening? This is NOT exceeding expectations!
Seriously, this is beyond idiocy, and an example of brain-dead poor engineering.
If your engineering staff can't test for simple shit like this and find this sort of problem, they should all be fired on the spot. There is NO excuse for this kind of failure to pass all of the intermediary design and testing levels and make it into live production.
Seriously, no one ever thought, "Hey, what happens if Mr Customer inserts the pen in upside down?"
That's a failure on multiple levels- design, prototype, initial testing, final design, and production. If one of my engineering teams had let this kind of craptastic customer-hostile bullshit out the door, I'd have fired them.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Don't give it to a young child and don't be dumb enough to stick it in backwards. Should my car manufacturer be held responsible for my gas powered vehicle's inability to run diesel? Non-story.
You missed one.
Don't buy the thing. Problem solved. Samsung FTW, right?
There are things you can obviously blame on the victim, like the kook who wanted to use a gymnastics high bar to vault off the edge of a cliff and it collapsed on him, sending him over the side completely uncontrolled.Miraculously, he survived.Yeah that was stupid.
But no, putting a pen in the wrong way, while obviously not paying attention, isn't necessarily a Nobel worthy moment, but it's shouldn't be a bitch the thing up moment either.
More importantly - it does not need to be designed in such a manner. So it shouldn't be designed in that manner. Amazing that people would stand up for bad design like this.
Here's an example of design. Many electrical outlets use polarized plugs and sockets. Why should they do that? Shouldn't a person measure all the voltages and where they are attached on the line before each insertion of a plug? The damage that could occur if a 240 VAC device could be plugged in the wrong way are rather greater than a phablet and stylus screwup, but the principles are the same. If something can get bitched up during normal use, it ain't good design. So while the superior beings who appear to inhabit parts of slashdot, and have never, and will never ever make a mistake - I salute you all. But there are mere mortals among you. It is your cross to bear, and your forbearance is appreciated.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The Samsung flaw was a basic design error that should have been caught early on (and frankly it should never have been made to begin with, but that's another story).
Yes, your car manufacturer should be held responsible if your vehicle allows you to use a fuel nozzle that is specifically designed to prevent this mistake from happening.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is a perfect example of over-engineering; designing something for flash rather than functionality. {...} What is wrong with a simple slot for the pen? Why do you need an ejection mechanism? All that does is add unnecessary parts and over complicate the design.
And even last century, when Palm launched its first PDA, it featured a notch on the side (imitating the pocket-clip that actual pen have) making it physically impossible to insert it the wrong way, and making easy to extract the pen without any physical retention mechanism (no need for complex mechanism. Just push the notch that protrudes out of the PDA body).
It's funny how more or less 20 years ago, the first PDA makers more or less got everything right.
And suddenly, since Apple's introduction of iPhone, everyone seems to have gone stupid and needs to re-solve the same problems.
It reminds me of the Tesla and people getting locked out of their cars because someone thought it would be a good idea to have retracting door handles (complete with all the moving parts that can break down).
And even, in the case of Tesla, that's still semi-justified. As it is a car, and needs to optimise for drag to increase effciency and fuel (or in this specific case: battery) consumption.
Car manufacturers have gone as far as making the 2 side mirrors differing in lenght a few milimeters, just to optimise for drag thus compensating the typically assymetric weight balance inside the car and shaving a few liters down per 100km.
Compared to that having door handles retracting flush doesn't seem far fetched at all.
(Tesla only need enough redundancy to be able to open it: if the retractable door handle mechanism fails, you still have several wireless way to open it - app or remote. Or if all the fancy electronics have failed - passive RRFID. In the case of electric failure in the car, the system still have a backup 12v battery to operate the doors. And in case of 12v failure, you can still charge/boost from the outside. At that point if even that fails, the event is so rare that smashing a window in an emergency [the "baby got stuck inside during a heat wave" scenario] seems acceptable)
Meanwhile, you don't really need flush body for a smart-phone - elevating its theoretical terminal velocity doesn't serve any sane purpose. And a backup solutions whould have been completely doable (either the notch as in Palm PDAs, or having a pin hole at the opposite side to push the stylus out).
But still, Samsung managed to create a useless feature, with no backup plan in case of failure.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The comments about Diesel nozzles vs gasoline nozzles for cars brought back a memory I hoped I had forgotten. Back in the 1960's an aircraft that was produced in two models -- one with reciprocating engines and the other with turboprop engines -- took off from Peachtree Dekalb airport north of Atlanta. It got airborne and just East of Atlanta the engines, which were gasoline engines, stopped since the aircraft had been fueled with Jet fuel. The aircraft made a crash "landing" on an Interstate very close to where I lived at the time. The landing was at least partially successful since I think most of the people on the aircraft survived, but there was at least one and perhaps several people in the cars in the way that did not. I was in my early teens then and can still remember that day. Back then at least it WAS possible to put the wrong fuel in an airplane. Bad designs happen -- some cost lives.
They're holding it wrong?
Yes, I noted that. Which goes to show that if it can be done wrong, someone wil do it wrong.
I could think of a couple of ways to design the fuel nozzles to prevent doing it wrong either way, but they would increase costs and fail potential.
With this thing, it would be pretty easy to design it so that you cannot put the pen in backwards. A slightly tapered hole, and the pen sized appropriately.
Yeah sorry guys, but I know a girl who tried to fill her car up with diesel and managed to try and drive off. You'd be amazed at how foolish some people are even with the specially designed nozzle heads. Not only does it happen, but sometimes not everything can be made idiot proof. The car analogy still stands.
Engineer: We've put $x million into user interface design so that the Note 5 is usable even by idiots.
Idiot: *Insert pen backwards*
Engineer: ARRRRRRRGH!!
Insert Different (tm).
No wait, don't Insert Different (tm). Inserting Differently (tm) is the problem. Forget we said that (r).
Schnapple
You should see what inserting a MicroSD card can do to a card slot on one of these phones. And unlike a pen, it's far less obvious which way is the right way for these cards; there isn't even a lot of resistance to inserting them the wrong way compared to the right way.
Cars can easily kill pedestrians and drivers. Cell phones, not so much.
You guys should have made it quite clear you needed NOT UNLEADED!!! before the attendant even got his hand on the dispenser.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Your analogy is broken.
Gasoline powered vehicles run on diesel. It won't be pretty, but they run. Its diesel cars that run on gasoline.
A better analogy would be: If I put my car in reverse while going forward, should the car manufacturer be held responsible for me destroying my car?
My car doesn't even let me put it into First while I'm going forward. Until I slow down to about 5mph, there is something that keeps the gear shift from slipping into that position. Once I get below the acceptable speed, it drops into First smoothly.
And this is on a 5-speed manual transmission in a Saturn. I'm sure the better cars have similar restrictions to protect the machine from idiots.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Samsung has failed us on the Note 5.
I have been a Note user since the Note 2.
Every note has improved it's predecessor, although Note 3 and 4 seem very similar... but it's still an upgrade in hardware and features.
The Note 5 had so much taken out and only a few things added with design flaws. The only advantage I see is slightly better 64bit octo cpu, slightly more memory, wireless charging, and better front and rear cameras.
Overall the Note 5 is a downgrade to me, and I probably will not upgrade to it. Yes they upgraded some things, but the removal of vital functionality outweighs any benefit.
... "Just don't hold it that way."
They're idiots. They should have made the diesel nozzle larger than the gas nozzle and the gas nozzle larger than the diesel nozzle.
Problem solved!
Or they should never have hired an attendant in the first place...
Of course we did. I wouldn't expect an attendant to assume we had a desiel car..
The store manager came out afterwards and said not to worry. The fuel was interchangeable and we would be fine driving away.
Good job, Samsung fanboy.
This is clearly a design flaw that didn't even exist on previous models. But it must be the users' fault that they can completely damage the one feature that sets this device apart from many others with one second of inattentiveness that none of the competitors, or even previous models, are susceptible to.
Yep, totally the users' fault that Samsung made completely unnecessary changes for the sake of change.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Shit - meant to respond to GP.
Didn't mean to call you a Samsung fanboy - you're correct with your seatbelt analogy. Slashdot needs to fix their 20 year old commenting system already.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That "something" is the synchronizers in the gearbox - they can't mesh if going too fast. Once they slow down, the synchro can mesh, and the gears will line up.
It's why you don't grind gears constantly when shifting unless you force it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I just got my note 3 5 a few days ago.
A Note 3 or a Note 5? The issue is for a Note 5, as others have said that the styles for the Note 3 has a different design that isn't susceptible to the issue.
Irrelevant. Most of the features listed above are not safety features.
Car companies are no different to cell phone companies, they only care about one thing: liability. Whether a feature is born out of a desire not to be dragged in front of a DA representing a dead person, or a desire not to be involved in a class action of angry idiots who held their phone wrong the result is ultimately the same. It ends up as nothing more than a line item under costs on a balance sheet
Actually, Apple neatly solved the whole problem in 2007 by doing away with the need for an ignorant stylus altogether.
Earlier PDA *could* also be operated with fingers. Resistive touch screen doesn't *require* a stylus. (Early Tomtom GPS were entirely finger operated resistive touch screens - no stylus available at all).
The stylus is simply an option for when you need more precision.
(To draw more precisely sketches, or operate smaller parts of UI).
What Apple did is doing away with the *precision*. (Hence the "on/off" sliders they've introduced in iOS. Much easier to operate than check boxes when using big fingers on a small screen).
A capacitive screen is a lot more coarse. You can't draw accurate sketches by finger painting. Apple's action have been a step back for PDA, making iPhone / iPodTouch a lot less good e.g. at taking notes during university lectures.
That made perfect sense for Apple (all they wanted is simply making phones / music players. Their main competitor wasn't Palm PDAs, it was candy bar phones & MP3 players. You didn't need a pen to operate a phone or an older iPod, why suddenly would you need one once they switched to touch screens ?).
But that's a big loss for PDA (they're the electronic descendent of paper note pads, personal organisers. i.e.: objects on which you write a lot. Stylus simply felt as the natural descendent of pens).
Samsung is simply trying to find a way to reintroduce the functionality in modern smart-phones. Give back the note taking ability of former PDAs. Thus they wanted to add the option for a stylus. They just went for way too much bling (flush to the body, complex ejection mechanics, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My Note 3 still works fine and I can't make that mistake with it. Oh yea sticking with the Note 3 won't make they ever expanding amounts of cash. They should have stuck with the old tried and true design...
Paul E. Bahre
Wow , what could the pen actually damage.