A Question of Loyalty #Samsungwhy #RIPmywatch #nocustomersupport

August 29, 2020

A Question of Loyalty #Samsungwhy #RIPmywatch #nocustomersupport

Well, here I am again. You guys thought I had vanished, didn't you? 😏 Afraid not, so you'll still have to bear with me a while longer. I was wondering as to what to write today, since being stuck at home on lockdown doesn't quite give me a lot of opportunities to go outside and talk about my day, when inspiration struck.

I thought about writing about an issue that has been plaguing me for a while, and something that you guys may benefit from (you can probably guess from the title and thumbnail). Samsung. Yep, that's the issue. The reputable brand that pretty much everyone knows, coupled with its rival Apple, both of whom have been the subject of many memes, is my issue. More specifically, with its products.

I was given a Samsung Gear S3 Frontier as a gift 2 years ago, and it was one of the best electronic gadgets I ever had. It's capabilities astounded me, and left me astonished. It was a smartwatch that redefined smartwatches. During these 2 years, it proved invaluable to me as it could measure my steps, heart rate, the number of floors I climbed, the altitude and pressure, as well as I a very handy gyroscope and accelerometer that could tell me how fast I was going or display my screen when I raised my wrist.

However, it stopped working last year in December, when Samsung rolled out Tizen 3.0.0.2. (that's the operating system software), all of my sensors crashed. I mean, overnight, all of them just magically crashed. I was pretty ticked off about that, especially since my watch had also gone in for servicing once before. I couldn't find any solutions on Google or the Samsung user manual/ website, so I put it away indefinitely since it was more or less an electronic paperweight for me. At first, I just thought it was a hardware issue and that this would be resolved in the future, when I got some free time again since I was preparing for my Cambridge exams.

Then COVID-19 happened, and all of were forced into lockdown. I took the chance to see if my Gear was working any better (hey, one can hope) and powered it on after charging it. Still no difference. I tried googling it again, hoping that some solution would've popped up by now, and what I saw blew my mind. There were several people with the same problem as me and they were all asking Samsung to fix their issue. The post had been marked as solved, but the solution was completely useless. People were complaining that their sensors had all stopped working suddenly after a software update, but did Samsung bother to take any action? Nope, not at all, with the moderators just posting the same solutions over and over which had been proven to be ineffective.

I was pretty miffed, but since the question of exams was still hanging over our heads as to whether or not we would have any, I put the watch and these thoughts out of my head. I tried once in June to fix the issue as well, but to no avail. Now, at the end of October, I tried again having read through all 35 pages of the issue forum with different troubleshooting techniques, and guess what? Nothing happened. My watch is still as broken as it was several months ago.

I didn't have a blog back then, so I couldn't talk about this issue, but since I have one now, I can. The watch was excellent when it worked, but now I think Samsung has stopped caring for its loyal customers. It's literally becoming Apple, wherein its slowing down or turning their old devices obsolete to force consumers to buy their new products, or pay even more to fix an issue that they themselves caused.

I'm really quite frustrated by the lack of support Samsung is providing to their loyal customers who buy their products instead of other companies'. I mean, frankly, the level of ignorance they are feigning has to rival even the best of actors. How can they not come up with an update that would fix our devices? I mean, come on. My watch is on Tizen 4.0.0.7. as of writing this post, but absolutely nothing has changed to fix my broken sensors. All my watch is good for now is just telling me the basic time, which can be done easily with any other watch.

That's all I can really say up to this point. Whether or not Samsung fixes this issue is up to them, and they just lost a very loyal customer on their smartwatches (since my phone seems to be functioning fine till now).

If you guys have any solutions or remedies to fix the situation, please leave them down in the comments down below. I'd be much obliged (really grateful). Well, I'll leave you with some memes about Samsung then to apologise for this long rant I've been on. I really needed to get it out of my system: