It is very easy to permanently damage the Samsung Galaxy Note 5—so easy, in fact, that inserting the S Pen backwards would physically break the stylus detection mechanism. Five months after the issue first surfaced, Phandroid is reporting that Samsung has made a small hardware fix to address the problem.
Leading up to Apple’s eagerly anticipated keynote presentation last night, Sony had a jab prepared for the iPhone-makers before they unveiled the iPhone 6s, Apple TV and iPad Pro. It seems, however, Sony wasn’t the only manufacturer attempting to rain on Apple’s parade. Arguably Apple’s biggest competitor, Samsung had a few of its own jibes to share with us and took to its UK Twitter handle to publish them…
Yesterday Android communities around the web were ablaze with discussion surrounding a flaw in the design of the stylus eject mechanism in Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 5 smartphone. Put simply, if you insert the S Pen stylus into the device slot from one end, all is well. Accidentally insert the pen from its opposite end, however, and risk permanently breaking functionality key to the Note 5’s power-user selling points — the device will no longer detect when you remove the pen. Samsung has responded quite bluntly.
In a comment to The Verge, the company essentially says that owners should just insert the S Pen from the end they want you to:
“We highly recommend our Galaxy Note5 users follow the instructions in the user guide to ensure they do not experience such an unexpected scenario caused by reinserting the S pen in the other way around.”
Here’s our explanation of the problem from yesterday (emphasis mine):
When working correctly, the S Pen detection feature will launch a note taking app when the pen is removed while the display is powered off. When powered on, the detection feature automatically launches the S Pen menu when the Pen is removed. After inserting the Pen in backwards, however, these detection features no longer work. Our own Dom Esposito fell victim to this flaw and was not able to get his S-Pen detection features working again.
While the obvious solution to this problem is to not insert the Pen backwards, it’s a common mistake that will likely plague a decent amount of Galaxy Note 5 users. The biggest problem is that the Pen goes in backwards with zero added force, meaning that it’s incredibly easy to mindlessly put it in the wrong way.
From these comments it doesn’t appear that Samsung has any intention of recalling customer devices or fixing the problem in new units in any way at all. It also seems, however, that the company was well aware of this problem before the phone’s consumer release, since a cautionary warning about the issue is right there in the device’s user manual (we haven’t been able to determine whether or not the manual included this prior to the controversy or was updated afterwards):
Samsung pushed its first Galaxy Note 5 TV commercial to YouTube today, and no surprise, it’s all about what you can do with that S-Pen. Set to a fast-paced percussion soundtrack, with speedy cuts in the edit, it has been designed to make you excited at all you can do with the stylus as well as convey a sense of productivity and speed.
LG this evening took the wraps off of two new variants of its G4 flagship. First is the LG G4 Stylus that features a Rubberdium Stylus, which allows for note taking and drawing on the device. The G4 Stylus features a 5.7-inch display (vs 5.5-inch on the G4) and a 13MP rear-facing camera. LG didn’t offer up specific details regarding the features of the stylus.
Sprint today announced a new stylus-equipped Android phablet option for its subscribers, starting with its Boost Mobile customers and coming soon to Sprint Prepaid and Sprint contract customers. The LG G Stylo is now available to purchase for $199 without a credit check or service contract for use with Boost Mobile plans which start $30/month ($35 without auto-renew) and include unlimited talk and text and up to 10GB of data.
LG G Stylo’s affordable price gets you a large 5.7-inch HD display with Gorilla Glass 3, Android 5.0 Lollipop for up-to-date software, an 8MP back camera and a 5MP selfie cam, plus a 1.2GHz quad-core processor and 3,000mAh removable battery…
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LG’s G3 Stylus, either leaked or teased earlier this month as a budget-friendly phablet, has now been officially confirmed – but it looks like it probably won’t go on sale in the USA.
The LG G3 Stylus is a pen-enabled smartphone that offers a large display and many of the premium user experience (UX) features of the G3 all in a fairly-priced package […]
LG will roll out the G3 Stylus in 3G markets starting in Brazil in September followed by countries in Asia, Middle East and Africa and CIS …
We originally got our first look at “S Choice” apps running on the new 5.3-inch Galaxy Note when Samsung showed off a selection of apps designed specifically for the device’s S Pen stylus at the launch event in London. While they already had a handful of apps including OmniSketch and Soonr Workplace up and running, the S Pen SDK (version 1.0) is now available for developers interested in creating their own applications optimized for S Pen.
Available from the Samsung Dev Tools portal here, the S Pen SDK allows you to create backgrounds for drawing with a ‘CanvasView’ feature, create panels for adjusting settings like line color an opacity with the ‘Pen Setting Popup’ feature, create panels for adjusting eraser widget with the ‘Eraser Setting Popup’ tool, and enable undo and redo. Screenshots after the break.
