I’ve been reading up on the Samsung S20 range with the Exynos 990 SoC that was bundled with it – the pitch forks are being bought in bulk as the gap, in terms of performance, between Qualcomm 865 and Exynos 990 grows and customers (who don’t have access to the Qualcomm 865 model) voice their frustraction online. When you’re selling an inferior product for the same price as a superior version that is only available in certain countries (South Korea, USA, Canada, China, Japan and Latin America) then it shouldn’t be surprising that there are customers who are angry at feeling as though they’ve been shafted by Samsung.
With all that being said, it’ll be interesting to see what happens towards the end of the year when Samsung release the next SoC for next years Samsung smartphone given that Samsung has announced that they’ve cancelled their custom CPU development (link) in favour of licencing ARM CPU designs then tweaking the design rather than building one from the ground up. There is also a new agreement between AMD and Samsung (link) which points to the future SoC being designed around Samsung’s own custom modem (which performs well in the real world) coupled with a GPU from AMD (probably based on the new RDNA architecture).
The other product I’m excited about is the Microsoft Duo – the folio style smart phone with two screens running Android. What attracts me to it is firstly Microsoft’s reputation for long term software support (when compared to other Android OEMs) but the interesting part will be the integration between Microsoft’s services and Android along with seeing what the customised Android experience will look like – will it have a fresh but unique look or will Microsoft attempt to bring the WinUI/Fluent design language so that there is a consistent look and feel between the the Windows 10X (Microsoft Neo) and Android (Microsoft Duo) devices.
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