I'm pretty surprised to see all the positive opinions of Samsung and their reliability/engineering. I have given them chance after chance after chance and they either fail spectacularly or consistently underwhelm. After this many bad experiences, I can't be the only one. I mean, here is all the stuff that I recall just in 2005:
I was on my 3rd Samsung N400 when everyone in the family switched to a Samsung VGA1000. All three N400s had non-functional speakerphones. They never fixed it. It's like some attempt at digital noise filtering was silencing the mic after a few seconds even with dead silence on both ends. About three seconds after turning on speakerphone the mic would stop working and never work again.
It blew my mind that their engineers could be so bad as to waste countless man-hours putting in a speakerphone that doesn't even work, but then all three of our Samsung VGA-1000 camera flip phones had a repeatable UI issue that would redial the wrong number while showing a different number on both LCDs. You wouldn't even know until the call was established (assuming it ever was). Stupid. Even after getting Sprint to update the phones years later, it never resolved this. There was also software on the phone that didn't even work, like some Java racing game demo that ran at 0.25 frames per second while the demo timer ran seemingly faster than full-speed causing the game to time-out and end before you could even leave the starting line. Maybe this was Sprint's error but the fact remained that I couldn't delete it and it displaced useful space for photos. Kinda funny to think, but the whole point of the demo was to get people to buy the game even though the demo actually showed that the phone couldn't even play it.
My $500 Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center directional controls stopped working and the replacement had a vertical line through the screen. I bought another on clearance and it also has a vertical line through the screen. I can't even make a functional one between the two. I didn't dare RMA it again after a major screw-up on their part the last time I RMA'd it. More on that...
Along with the YH-999 I RMA'd a $200 Samsung YP-T7Z 1GB digital audio player which was non-functional out of the box (couldn't charge; 100% non-functional after depleting the factor charge). I caught that before leaving but Best Buy wouldn't let me exchange it in-store because I would lose my discount on a bundled speaker deal... so I agreed to RMA instead and had to walk out of the store with a broken player for a new price. When I balked at Samsung for offering a refurbished replacement for a new player I had just paid full-price for (I could've just bought a cheaper refurb in the first place) their rep told me that the refurbished ones were "better" specifically because they were tested while the ones sold in stores weren't (hence, my issue). They basically admitted that they do not test basic functionality like "ability to charge" before they ship a product. Yikes!
Oh, it gets worse though: Even though I received and followed very specific instructions for RMA'ing two products at the same time (put each in a separate box with a separate RMA number then package in a larger outer box with both RMA numbers), they somehow completely lost the YP-T7Z and I had to fight with them for the better part of a year to get a replacement. They kept trying to pin the blame on me by not acknowledging receipt even though they did acknowledge the YH-999 that shipped with it!
After that amazingly bad experience from 2005 I didn't completely avoid Samsung. I bought a Galaxy note 3 at launch and use a Galaxy Note9 now. I'm still amazed at the basic software/UI failures though... like, why can't their S-pen markup images with dual-color contrasting lines (like meme text)? Why can't I make straight lines and arrows and boxes just because I can also do handwritten lines and arrows and boxes? Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's been almost a decade and they still can't get their flagship feature to work the way you EXPECTED it to all along.
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