Review of Samsung M30s?

[turgsh01]

Does anyone know if LTT plans to make a review of the Samsung M30s? I've watched a lot of non-English review videos of the phone and am quite satisfied with what I saw except for a few things... stuff that needed to be spoken, like actual battery life expectancy during normal use and what can be expected if on a sort of eco mode where the extras are disabled to extend battery life, whether or not anyone is complaining of battery getting warm or catching fire, or any other complaints about the phone that could otherwise make it a bad choice in phone purchase.

 

I'd even be willing to accept a review / opinions from a random user here who actually owns the phone.

 

I know it's likely going to be a pain in the butt for me to get my hands on the phone without dealing with those dumb contracts they try to force on me, so if I'm going to go through the bother of trying to find a seller willing to sell me the phone without contract, I want to know everything I need to know beforehand so there's no surprises / disappointments.

[turgsh01]

As someone who has never owned a smartphone yet, I'm not sure what you mean by custom rom. I am happy about the SD card slot cuz I plan on getting the 4GB version as I don't need the extra ram since I have no intentions on multi-tasking or playing games on it. I'm one of the minority who uses his phone mainly as a phone... and occasionally music and quick camera for unimportant stuff. I have no interest in social media stuff other than a few forums which I prefer to visit using a computer. Battery and reliability for me matters more than anything else (which is why I'm still using the 10yr old Sony w995). So I'm quite glad of the M30s release as I finally feel like a respectable manufacturer released something worth me buying, that is, if it really is as good as I think it is.

[turgsh01]

Ok, I can't imagine being upset with not having the option of using other roms, even though I usually like having options available to me. It is interesting that no one bothers to create roms for that chipset though. Is it just because it's slower or is there some unique coding that makes it not worth it?

 

I did recently find out that apparently whenever there's an emergency announcement, all smartphones in the area get overridden and you have no choice but to listen to it, even if it's like 3am. It'd be nice if I had the option to override that nonsense, cuz sometimes, they announce kids missing or something multiple times a day which to me is just an abuse of that system. I imagine that would probably require a custom rom feature... but oh well, not a big deal.

 

EDIT:  Also, I just noticed something... even though the phone is officially released several days ago, I'm not seeing any stores selling it within North America according to online research. I'm hoping it's just being a bit slow to release, but otherwise, this would really suck if this is the one phone I'm not able to get my hands on.

[turgsh01]

On 10/3/2019 at 1:02 PM, huilun02 said:

Custom roms are not exactly easy to install. Its far more complicated than say, installing Windows on a new PC. The manufacturer (or any company) will not tell you what you need to do. People will make custom roms if the hardware is worth a damn, and they will need access to do it. Access in this case refers to unlocking the bootloader and having kernal sources to build a rom on. Both can come only from the device manufacturer. And for case of Exynos chipsets, Samsung does not allow it.

 

Some homework for you then

I dont face this issue in my country. Never had to deal with it. No reason to find the solution myself

 

Its being released in India first. Samsung wants more market share and retention over there. Because Indians use their phones a lot (this is an understatement) and they happen to be remarkably technically inclined because most of them need to get as much value as possible from the money they spend. The eastern half of the world map is where there is greater potential for market growth. Thus companies focus their good value stuff on those areas. The US is unfortunately too riddled with sheep who buy into marketing more than the merits of the product itself.

Ah, ok. Sucks, but oh well.

I'll definitely be looking into that when I get my phone.

US isn't the only one filled with Sheep... Canada is unfortunately just as bad.

 

I just bought the phone on eBay from India directly (with a cheap temporary case until more show up), so I guess I lost patience for a review and just went for it. There was just no info at all on when or even if it would ever release in Canada... so I just went for it. $400 which is probably more than it's worth, but not to me. I'll likely post my own amateur thoughts on it after I receive it and have had a week or two with it.

[turgsh01]

I never heard of CDMA, but I do know of GSM/LTE which is what I think my current phone uses.

 

As for price... I tried finding a cheaper price on other sites, but they would only sell to US (would not let me enter a 6 pin postal code), so eBay was my only reliable option with PayPal support. I'm fine with it so long as it works without any issues.

 

I did notice a contradiction in price conversion between what I paid (using PayPal) and what google and eBay said I'd be paying... one of them clearly got it wrong. eBay said I'd be paying about $380 with tax and shipping, then when it came to actually paying for it, PayPal added another $20 on top of it claiming it was the conversion. With all the nonsense they've been doing lately with their refund policy, it wouldn't surprise me if they took it a step further and started scamming this way too.