Daily Authority: 👴 End of the Galaxy S9

Update

🍳 Good morning! I bought a friend Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen cookbook for their birthday, but very sadly they already had it! So, now I have an Ottolenghi Test Kitchen cookbook… (A grilled veg with mustard and Parmesan dressing idea looked pretty good for upcoming BBQs!)

Samsung’s old and old-but-new

It’s out with the old at Samsung and …in with the old?

S9 end of life:

  • First, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus have come to the end of life for their software support.
  • A four-year run of software updates looks to be over after Samsung removed the S9 series from its security updates page, after previously scaling them back to quarterly updates.
  • Samsung did some good and some bad here: The S9 duo weren’t meant to get support for quite this long, but keeping the support going was a good decision.
  • That said, it’s still somewhat of a shame that the S9 will become a bit of a risk to keep using, with that risk only growing over time.
  • One decent option moving forward is trade-ins: My colleague Adamya points out that Samsung is offering “juicy trade-in discounts between $270 and $300 when you purchase the Galaxy S22 Ultra. That’s a pretty neat deal for phones that are so old.”
  • I see that the average price on Swappa is about $160 or so for an S9, a bit more for an S9 Plus.

S20 FE 2022 Edition: Back again?

  • As for the in-with-the-old part of this story, Samsung announced the Galaxy S20 FE 2022… the very same phone it announced in 2020, but now cheaper. And in 2022.
  • It’s still the same device: 6.5-inch 120Hz OLED, Snapdragon 865 chipset, 6GB/128GB, 4,500mAh battery, and triple rear camera system (12MP main, 12MP ultrawide, 8MP 3x telephoto).
  • Now the trick is, Samsung has only launched this in Korea so far, and the only difference is that the price is down to $575, about $165 off the original.
  • It’s possible Samsung will release this more widely if it’s well picked up.
  • But… safe to say I don’t get it. The included AKG headset from the original release is missing, so you get fewer accessories.
  • And no confirmation that it puts the S20 FE 2022 Edition on a different software schedule to get four years of updates from this point.
  • Maybe it makes sense in Korea, maybe Samsung is just trying to flush out its stock.

Roundup

👉 Is the cheaper OnePlus 10 Pro price tag worth the trade-offs? (Android Authority).

🏃‍♂️ With Peloton Guide, the fitness company bets big on body tracking (Wired).

🧠 “Do humans have a dominant kidney? A human can be left- or right-handed, is it the same for kidneys??” (r/askscience).

Chart Tuesday

What a great chart: the price of nails going back to 1695:

Tristan Rayner / Android Authority

  • The story is nails used to be made by hand, and were not cheap! Nails used to be precious.
  • The US National Bureau of Economic Research studied nails as a look at the history of manufacturing: As large-scale manufacturing took over, prices dropped — until World War II, that is.
  • The productivity gains in nails aren’t at the scale of computing, for example, but still remarkable: Nails were once about 0.4% of the entire US GDP, or on the scale of air travel today.

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.

Comments

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrDq6ainJGqwam70aKrsmaTpLpwsMCio7JlkarBqbvRoquyZZGlv6q4jG5ka2hiZ3p0fZNyaHFxXw%3D%3D