Waching daily Feb 19 2019

- This week Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S10,

and the S10 Plus, and also an S10e, and probably a 5G phone,

and they're probably going to show off a foldable phone too,

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 S9 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 9 Pie

on the Galaxy S9.

And it has this new interface called One UI.

And I gotta tell you, it's uh, 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 here 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 hard attempt to clean up Android,

then they dial it back,

then they go super neon try hard 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 I'm the big new thing.

But a feature just makes your phone better

without you having to think about it

or even necessarily 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 muddy's it up

with all this other crap on it that you don't really need

or like, or even want.

But did you know, that it didn't actually start

on Android, it started as a Windows Mobile skin.

Yeah, it's that old.

So here's the thing, I can't believe I'm doing this,

but I'm going to 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 it's 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 and not very elegant.

And on the Galaxy S3, guess what it did by default?

It made this bloop noise every time you touched it.

Bloop! Bloop!

Come on.

Bloop!

Oh, and Samsung had heard that you liked features

so it put features on top of other features.

It felt like it had to differentiate it's 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,

it just did a horrible job of executing on it.

And while it 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,

sounds like the worst band name ever.

But now they have this new thing

which they're calling One UI.

Let's talk about skins.

One UI isn't really a skin, because there's no such thing

as pure Android anymore, not in a 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 let's you change the main buttons

to swipe up gestures, so you can reclaim a little bit

of screen real estate.

Also, dark mode in Samsung apps, they beat Google to it.

And it's really nice.

I think the S10 software is going to be a lot like

the One UI experience 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 9 Pie

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.

Oh, Bixby, you.

If Samsung can fix that update problem,

I could really get behind the One UI.

For one, it's 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 app,

it 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 gotta say, Samsung you do gotta chill out

with the Samsung Health app.

I don't want it, quit showing it to me.

Anyway, most importantly, Samsung seems to have

it's 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 it's own, in it's 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.

Hey everybody, thanks for watching.

Have you checked out One UI, let me know what you think

down in the comments.

Also, stay tuned to The Verge.

We're gonna have hands on's and live blogs and everything

for Samsung's Unpacked event on February 20.