One of the biggest downsides of buying a carrier branded Android smartphone is bloatware. Regardless of the carrier, you’re going to find at least a handful of added applications on your device which, in most cases, you can’t delete. Verizon isn’t always the worst in this area, but things could have been much worse if an idea from the company had come to fruition.
Verizon released an OTA update today for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge that adds some minor features and fixes several bugs. However, users have noticed that the update also installs a service called DT Ignite that allows carriers to quietly install bloatware. This addition went unmentioned in Verizon’s release notes, but fortunately is easy to disable.
I first took a look at the ZenFone 2 when it was announced back at CES, and I remember standing at the ASUS press conference actually very impressed with what ASUS managed to do here. While many that I talked to immediately discounted the device — because, well, it is another ASUS ZenFone — I stood behind it as someone who had actually tried it out first-hand. The phone packs some great hardware, and while it was assumed that this was just going to be another underwhelming mid-range handset to clutter the 2015 lineup, I thought this one actually deserved a second look.
Four months after the phone’s announcement in January, it finally went up for sale for North American customers on Amazon. There are two variants here, the first being a lower-end model that costs just $200 and sports 16 GB of storage, and the second is the 64 GB model, coming in at $300. We’re going to be taking a look at the higher-end model in this review, and that’s worth noting because storage space isn’t the only differentiator between these two devices. The high-end $300 model also sports a better processor, as well as that record-breaking 4 GB of RAM…
TouchWiz has long been known as being far too full of bloat and unnecessary software, but the real problem with Samsung’s version of Android is that these added features come with a hard hit on performance. According to a report this morning from SamMobile, the Korean company might be going as far as to remove all features from the OS that can possibly be downloaded—and this just so happens to coincide with today’s market share numbers showing that Apple and Samsung were neck-and-neck in Q4.
