Daily Authority: 👴 End of the Galaxy S9

🍳 Good morning! I bought a friend Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen cookbook for their birthday, but very sadly they already had it! So, now I have an Ottolenghi Test Kitchen cookbook… (A grilled veg with mustard and Parmesan dressing idea looked pretty good for upcoming BBQs!)

Samsung’s old and old-but-new

It’s out with the old at Samsung and …in with the old?

S9 end of life:

• First, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus have come to the end of life for their software support.
• A four-year run of software updates looks to be over after Samsung removed the S9 series from its security updates page, after previously scaling them back to quarterly updates.
• Samsung did some good and some bad here: The S9 duo weren’t meant to get support for quite this long, but keeping the support going was a good decision.
• That said, it’s still somewhat of a shame that the S9 will become a bit of a risk to keep using, with that risk only growing over time.
• One decent option moving forward is trade-ins: My colleague Adamya points out that Samsung is offering “juicy trade-in discounts between $270 and $300 when you purchase the Galaxy S22 Ultra. That’s a pretty neat deal for phones that are so old.”
• I see that the average price on Swappa is about $160 or so for an S9, a bit more for an S9 Plus.

S20 FE 2022 Edition: Back again?

• As for the in-with-the-old part of this story, Samsung announced the Galaxy S20 FE 2022… the very same phone it announced in 2020, but now cheaper. And in 2022.
• It’s still the same device: 6.5-inch 120Hz OLED, Snapdragon 865 chipset, 6GB/128GB, 4,500mAh battery, and triple rear camera system (12MP main, 12MP ultrawide, 8MP 3x telephoto).
• Now the trick is, Samsung has only launched this in Korea so far, and the only difference is that the price is down to $575, about $165 off the original.
• It’s possible Samsung will release this more widely if it’s well picked up.
• But… safe to say I don’t get it. The included AKG headset from the original release is missing, so you get fewer accessories.
• And no confirmation that it puts the S20 FE 2022 Edition on a different software schedule to get four years of updates from this point.
• Maybe it makes sense in Korea, maybe Samsung is just trying to flush out its stock.

Roundup

👉 Is the cheaper OnePlus 10 Pro price tag worth the trade-offs? (Android Authority).

📈 Google will use Google Play Protect to remove permissions for unused apps for safety/privacy purposes (Android Authority).

⌚ “I found the perfect use case for Wear OS, but it’s not a watch” — clever! (Android Authority).

📺 It’s hard to believe Samsung’s new, matte The Frame is actually a TV (The Verge).

🐵 It’s back: Return to Monkey Island confirmed by Ron Gilbert as real, slated for 2022 launch (Ars Technica).

🎮 Valve says it’s ‘ramping up’ Steam Deck shipments (The Verge).

👉 Fortnite maker Epic Games raised $144m to aid humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, from just two weeks of revenue, though of course a lot of people bought in-game items they might not have bought otherwise… Interesting to see how much Epic “loses” now that everyone has filled up their accounts, or are people just going to buy more stuff now they have a taste for it? (BBC).

🔋 The DeLorean EV will be unveiled on August 18, oh my (Engadget).

🔓 Hackers breached Mailchimp to target crypto holders (Engadget).

🏃‍♂️ With Peloton Guide, the fitness company bets big on body tracking (Wired).

🐟 “Your diet needs more ugly fish” (The Takeout).

🧠 “Do humans have a dominant kidney? A human can be left- or right-handed, is it the same for kidneys??” (r/askscience).

Chart Tuesday

What a great chart: the price of nails going back to 1695:

• The story is nails used to be made by hand, and were not cheap! Nails used to be precious.
• The US National Bureau of Economic Research studied nails as a look at the history of manufacturing: As large-scale manufacturing took over, prices dropped — until World War II, that is.
• The productivity gains in nails aren’t at the scale of computing, for example, but still remarkable: Nails were once about 0.4% of the entire US GDP, or on the scale of air travel today.

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.