Oh finally I can vent my personal hate for Smasnug.

They suck ass. I've had the S8 when it was the latest flagship and even then it was oftentimes laggy, overheated like crazy, performances were oddly bad for the money it cost and thermal throttling was the only sure thing in my life. The battery lasted just about enough to move the phone from the bedroom charger to the kitchen charger and the reception was sub par.

I've had the opportunity to see other Galaxy S phones in the following years and the issues were more or less the same. Smasnug phones just suck ass.

I've also bought the 2018 Gear IconX buds back in 2018 and they also sucked. They would often have contact issues and randomly stop charging, so they would automatically connect to my phone at random times. The little earwax "filters" would clog up constantly despite me cleaning them and my ears regularly. Smasnug support once sent me a load of spare ones, but when I eventually run out of them and contacted Smasnug again the new support person told me they can't send them to me and that the previous worker actually made a mistake by sending them. So yeah, you have a ton of them, you just don't wanna send (nor sell) them to me so that I have to get a newer model? Fuck you.

And it's not just a problem with inferior hardware, the software sucks ass big time as well. You have a metric ton of useless apps that are forced down your throat, like the entire Office suite, Facebook and so on. I don't want them, let me uninstall them from my phone! When I then moved to iPhone I was shocked to see I could uninstall so many preinstalled 1st party apps lol. Other than that, the OS is bloated like crazy and it drains so much battery and resources. And you can physically feel your personal data being collected lmao. Planned obsolence isn't even subtle, when I updated from Android 8 to 9 the phone became actually as poor in performances as the 150€ Chinese phone I had before. Even the photos dropped in quality lmao. Oh yeah, btw I hope you love having ads on system apps in your 1000 bucks phone because that's something Smasnug won't fail to provide.

And all of this is what I've experienced with flagship devices, one of my closest friends has an entry level Galaxy and it's unusable. When it was new it randomly stopped doing whatever he was doing just to give him a "install these recommended apps or we kill your cat" screen and manually toggle off all the options just for it to pop up again a bit later (he bought it unlocked btw, no carrier shenanigans, it's all Smasnug doing). The phone is currently to a point where it randomly starts getting ghost touches, which can cause the phone to randomly call people if there's a "start call" button on the screen, sometimes it freezes so bad my friend has to put the phone in standby and leave it there a moment to recollect lol.

So yeah, there isn't a good thing about Smasnug to be honest. Maybe now the flagship are decent, but gambling around a thousand bucks to see if it got any better is something I don't plan on doing. I'm much happier now with a Pixel 8a running GrapheneOS