Regret purchasing the S24 Ultra

[Entomy]

Bought a S24 Ultra two months ago and this is going down as the worst phone, and even the worst piece of tech/electronics I've ever purchased. I regret my decision and shouldn't've spent so much time trying to fix things or figure things out, because now I'm stuck with the phone.

The fingerprint sensor doesn't work 1/3 of the time with clean bare hands, and doesn't work at all when wearing exam gloves (the clear vinyl kind), despite several cheaper phones working reliably across both. Call support for help and... apparently it works fine if you turn off Bluetooth? What the heck? I can't do that at work, so this isn't a viable solution, but like... why would that even matter? A cheap $200 phone has been able to do this fine but a $1300 one can't?

The facial recognition is terrible. Legitimately worse than a 2017 early adopter of the method could do. Maybe gets my face right 5% of the time. Completely useless. A cheap $200 phone could do it reliably, even when I had to start masking up for work all the time. But heavens forbid a $1300 phone be able to.

The Bluetooth quality is absolutely a joke. Devices no more than two feet away regularly cut out. It can't disconnect from a device literally miles away on its own, and I have to manually tell it to. And it can't connect to important devices around the house like my smart locks or even one of my cars audio system, even though plenty of other devices can no problem.

For whatever reason, biometrics was programmed on this phone to only try for the fingerprint unless you press a button to switch to face... what's even the point? I can just press the fingerprint scanner. None of my previous phones did this. It's obtuse and makes a major feature pointless... not that it works anyways, but still.

Volume regularly tries to outsmart me, rather than just letting me do my thing. Previous phoned would save volume across different devices, or stay with whatever the current volume is. Either is fine. This phone does neither, and seemingly just makes up it's own volume choice. I didn't think this was the case at first, but took some time a few weeks back to disconnect and reconnect to the same speaker several times only for the phone to have different volumes each time. What crack head designed this?

Gestures collide in some awful ways, like opening up your card wallet, switching apps, and opening your AI assistant are all basically upswipes from the bottom, but slightly different spots. I can't get the one I want half the time, and routinely fumble around when trying to do something.

Location services with this phone can be... insane... often claiming I'm in an entire different country. No GPS connected device I've used has ever been like this. It's not even like I'm near the border or something... it will claim I'm a 7 hour drive away, well over 250 miles, from where I am.

The security system just decides it's changed when I changed nothing, and I have to go into every single secure app I use and re-enable biometric login. This is roughly every other week. Never seen anything like this with any prior device. Here's the best part though... not all apps do this each time, and it's not the same one each time. I just get a random lottery for "hey you need to reconfigure this app" every so often.

The keyboard tries to outsmart my password manager, and very often I can see the password manager prompt show up, only to immediately disappear and return to the default buttons. This doesn't happen at all on other phones or with other keyboards. However, other keyboards don't respond that well on this phone, despite working fine on other phones.

Certain things behave drastically different on this phone than others. I understand this is subjective, but let me make my point. I use an accessibility app, Live Transcribe, a lot at work. I see many deaf patients, not all of them regularly wear their hearing aids. Some don't think they're even deaf. We often need to write things down. Live Transcribe is great for this. Only on this phone, it's installed but hidden. An accessibility app is... hidden... what the heck? I go into app settings where you can hide apps and look... Live Transcribe is nowhere to be found. Turns out, there's an entirely different way to unhide the app. Why? Why would you ever do that? On three other phones I've had you install it and it shows up on the app drawer like normal. Samsung support couldn't even help me do that, I got help with that from my carrier. Why does the carrier know the phones better than the company who makes them?

I live in a rural area and the obtrusive notifications that let me know I'm now roaming, or similar, become infuriating. They don't go away until you press Cancel. They constantly interrupt whatever I'm doing. I can easily get four to five of these every single minute. And I can't figure out how to make them stop. I don't care if I'm roaming. I pay for unlimited roaming so I don't need to care. I don't care if I have no cell service. I've always just seen the symbol in the upper right change to reflect the status. I don't need a pop-up to interrupt me. I don't want it. And I especially don't care about repeatedly being told I don't have a cell connection when I'm on WiFi trying to watch a video. Stop it.

I have more but like... oh my god this phone is so bad. I hate that I bought this. I hate that I'm stuck with it. This is horrible. I feel like I was sold a massively inferior product through deceptive marketing.

[KoalaBoy]

Wow! Was it a third-party repair center? I know by me they're using UBreakIFix and Best Buy locations for repair.

[Entomy]

I don't think so, considering it would be in New York City. Problem is though, I'm on the opposite side of the state and it's a big state 😅

[KoalaBoy]

I don't know where you live, but I went to the Samsung site and searched for repair centers near Buffalo and found one in Cheektowaga. Can you double-check there aren't any repair centers near you? https://www.samsung.com/us/support/service/locations/?product=N0061135

[Entomy]

That's the closest I see, but it's still over 5 hours. Not sure why Samsung themselves couldn't find that store.

[KoalaBoy]

Without telling me where you live, can you give me a town near you?

[Entomy]

I've checked the site, and there's nothing within the 75 miles it searches. I've tried searching out of a few larger towns or small cities around here and it looks like the nearest was in Cheektowaga like you found.

[KoalaBoy]

I do see there are some parts of NY that show no repair centers within 75 miles, like when I search Henderson. Did you try using the chat support, do you other options since you're not near a repair center? Or, maybe since it is a 1300 phone like you said, you could go down to one of the far away repair centers (with an appointment) on a Saturday (assuming you're busy during the week and don't want to take time off work or school)

[Entomy]

Well that's where I unfortunately run into some major problems. I hinted at it in the OP, but I work in healthcare, so there are some major complications to me taking the time off to go deal with this. Not the least of which is that it's just not a good use of my valuable vacation time. The also gave me the option of mailing it in, but then I'm without a phone for 5-7 days and my phone is also used at work, like for connecting to equipment we use (I work traveling between homes, rather than in a hospital). And with the bad customer support I received from Samsung, I'm just not particularly hopeful a replacement of this phone would be good, especially since some of the complaints are with software, not hardware, and would exist across individual devices.

[userb6ZDCtNe2U]

With the fingerprint lock issue you can store multiple finger scans on your device at one time. What I usually do to increase the likelihood of a successful unlock is to scan the same finger multiple times including the times you use gloves and see if that helps. Also helps to scan your finger in many different positions. Hope that helps.

[Entomy]

This does help, and is something I've known about. Unfortunately the 1/3 failure rate is with each thumb registered 3 times. I couldn't even register with exam gloves 🤷‍:male_sign: