Amongst all of the news from Samsung Unpacked yesterday, there were a bit of the smaller details that were revealed. These are interesting tidbits either about the new hardware and/or the new software onboard. We found only 6 noteworthy ones but if we found more, we will come back to update this. So let’s get started.
Everything Announced At The Galaxy S20 Event
No Bixby button
I’m sure at this point, no one is sad about this. But it looks like Samsung might be done forcing Bixby on us via their smartphones. Hopefully, they’ll continue to work on it cuz its cool but needs more work and has serious competition between Alexa & Google Assistant. Rejoice!
The entry-level S20 doesn’t support the fastest 5G
At the current time, there are only 2 forms of 5G: one is slightly faster than LTE w/ a great range and the other is lightning fast speeds but limited range. The latter is using millimeter wave technology – this is the one that Verizon is using for their 5G. If you get the S20+ or the S20 Ultra, you’ll be fine. But for those of you grabbing the regular S20, you’ll be out of luck for the gigabit speeds. The upside is that Verizon plans to release a version of the S20 that supports it later in the year.
MicroSDs are mandatory if you plan on shooting 8K videos
Samsung is making the S20 line future-proof by having it shoot 8K video @24fps. The only thing w/ that is 8K video isn’t small by count. 8K is around 7680 × 4320 resolution from its 64MP or 108MP lens. So it will take up a lot of space, like 600MB per minute. That and a maximum recording time of 5 minutes. So the standard 128GB of storage will fill up rather quickly so there is no question about needing a microSD card for this one.
Samsung has their version of AirDrop within One UI 2
Now there were rumors about this and it looks to be true. Samsung beat Google to market w/ their version of AirDrop called Quick Share. This will allow you to share files or content w/ up to 5 other friends (who have a version of the S20) w/o any Bluetooth pairing of sorts. The interesting thing is that AirDrop only allows for only one recipient at a time though so this gives Samsung a leg up of sorts.
Google Duo is now built into the Phone app for HD video calls
Google & Samsung has been working a lot closer together these days and its for the better. Instead of pushing customers to their own video chat app, you can use Google Duo. It is a great FaceTime alternative for Android BTW. This will allow for great auto-focusing 1080p video calls w/ loved ones – especially if you get the S20 Ultra w/ that 40MP selfie camera. The S20 allows for the quality to be higher than 720p which is the quality on any other device.
Google Live Caption is no longer a Pixel exclusive
The Pixel 4 showed off a lot of new software features from Google. One of them was their new Live Caption that gives any content you’re watching super accurate closed caption. That feature is now on the S20 line of devices. Thanks to all of the processing power + RAM, it does all of this on-device and doesn’t need to go to Google’s servers. Just like on the Pixel 4.
That’s all I got. Like I said, I’ll update this if I find anything else out. Is any of this news getting you more excited or less to pre-order yours next week?
