Just a reminder that A Link to the Past Randomizer exists and is also quite fun

I mean the vivo fold 3 is $500 cheaper than the fold 6, I’d say that’s some major value. And again from everything I’ve seen the software is basically up to snuff now. They all have flex mode, great multi window support (probably better on the vivo with 16gb of RAM), gapps support. I basically monitor equipment for work so I do literally nothing unless something breaks. With that my phone is my main entertainment device. In the video I linked, the battery benchmark he ran had the vivo fold beat the Samsung by almost 4 hours; even if that’s not real world I’m sure it still outpaces the fold 6 significantly. My SOT is pretty normally like this, so any improvement in battery would be great… Which Samsung hasn’t done in 3 years. And fully charged in like a third of the time too.

The deals and support come back to what I said in my initial comment, that’s why I haven’t pulled the trigger. But man I wish I could.

I mean I guess I’ve never actually used one but every video I’ve seen from people like flossy Carter and such only rave about them.

I watched this yesterday and it made the vivo seem pretty much like a clear win. Basically the only thing Samsung has going for it is the software. And I’m sure in its home market this thing crushes the fold

Same. As a foldables guy, literally any Chinese folding phone looks leagues ahead of the z fold. I would love to get something like the vivo x fold 3 but warranty and cellular compatibility spook me. Samsung has me held hostage here in the states

I really don’t get the absolute vitriol foldables get on Lemmy. I love my z fold 5 and the use cases are numerous. Need to fill in some personal data? Dual screen your password manager and easily go back and forth. Play games on your phone? Basically ever game I’ve seen scales beautifully to the inner screen’s resolution. Want a second monitor? Put the thing in kickstand mode and have your YouTube video playing on the side while you do whatever else.

The three things I always hear against them are basically what you said: price, crease, and durability. The price is just kinda what it is; there’s a lot of tech in here and it’s expensive to make. So I totally get it if that’s people’s hang up.

The crease is a total non issue. What a lot of people do is hear about the crease, think about how bad it sounds, go to best buy to check it out, focus solely on the crease and nothing else, and say wow this awful. In reality though, the moment you use the inner screen the crease totally fades away, just how the notch did when apple first made it. You don’t even feel it because you never have your fingers in the center of the screen, they’re always in their respective halves.

Now for durability, I can only speak to my own experience. I’ve had the 3, 4, 5, and soon to be the 6. So that’s roughly a year between each model and not the longest time for things to break. But in all of that time and all of those devices, I’ve never had a single issue. No cracked screens, not permanent marks on the inner screen, no broken hinges. If you go on reddit sure you’ll probably find some complaints, but remember it’s an Internet forum… A lot more people are going to complain about issues than exclaim how well their device has always worked.

In any case, highly recommend and you should definitely get one.

The 6P was the pinnacle of android for me. Beautiful design, backside fingerprint reader, and still a cheapish price before Google started with their pixel nonsense (actually made me go iPhone for a few generations because I was so pissed at what they ditched the nexus line for). But yeah, just a great culmination of android being in a good place, hardware, and nostalgia.

Samsung’s is pretty useless though… Just says “good.” Now idk if there’s more details that populate when it’s bad but just having a single word doesn’t really fill me with confidence. Would be nice to see some more stats.

I get the sentiment for sure and nothing looks worse than seeing 5 of them knocked over on a sidewalk but they were pretty nice. Here in Seattle it’s hilly as fuck so walking down a hill to downtown then scootering back up was nice. Hopefully a good bike share can replace them.

Thanks for the response. I would just like to say even if an update did do that, that still doesn’t have anything to do with how to remove it… When I posted this, I was hoping there was just some setting I was missing.

Thanks for the serious reply, I appreciate it! Now that you mention it, me having a fold must definitely be it. For some apps when I highlight text, the menu sometimes spans almost the whole screen. And again, thank you for the tips you provided for the software side. Unfortunately, I’m a hardware guy so diving into any of that seems impossible to me haha.

What I did find however, is a possible solution though. To originally remove the Amazon search button, I had to reinstall the app. This worked for a few hours, but at some point it came back on its own. Doing some more sleuthing, I realized that Samsung (maybe it’s an android thing too though?) has a deep sleep function. Basically, you can deep sleep an app so it’s essentially disabled until you open the app again. So even going into the system’s app list in settings, it now lists Amazon as “disabled.” So no running in the background and I suppose telling other apps it’s installed so they can display that search button. I only just discovered this while posting, so while the button is removed now, it remains to be seen if it’ll stay working.

This set up works for me since the app stays easily accessible in my app drawer, and as far as I can tell, still works perfectly fine upon launching. So I can still use it for my required use cases. Now if you need your apps to function in the background this may not be a solution. I wish there was just a simple setting is settings somewhere that addressed what and in what order appears in this menu. That would simplify a lot of things. Just another reminder of how we own nothing anymore… In any case, thanks for the response. Hope this can help you too.

I mean I figured it out in the end, but I didn’t know if there was a setting somewhere that controlled what went in that menu. Still can’t find an answer to that.

Very true, I’m sure there are some manufacturers that have sold out, and incorporated amazon search into their OS. Even with that though, that just addresses the reason why it’s there, not the question I asked: how to get rid of it. Thanks for the response though, I appreciate it.

I mean the question posed I figured you could glean enough that more info would be redundant. I don’t see how Amazon being on a right click menu would be reliant on an OS update. As for what apps it was in, again, I figured since I asked for the right click menu, it would be apparent that every right click menu was showing that, since all apps have that same menu. And the other two questions I had answered already.

As someone who works in tech support I understand the pain of dealing with uninformed users. I figured though if someone asked a technical question on a site as obscure as Lemmy, on an android forum, that would give some credit to the fact that I’m not just some schmuck with a Galaxy a54. Instead I was getting comments on why I use Amazon. I mean come on lol, not everyone is living a foss/privacy guaranteed life.

Always love an adversarial tone when I ask for help. Android 13 on fold 5, every app, answered the other questions already.

Yeah I feel you that was me for a while. Eventually I said enough was enough and every time I came across a service that was linked to my Gmail I unlinked and made a new account. It doesn’t have to be all at once, slow and steady wins the race too.

There’s alternatives for all of that, why are you stuck on Google? You could create a new email on a different site or host your own and there would be no differences between it and a gmail account. For photo services you could build a nas that has auto backup and never pay a penny again to Google. I understand they are pervasive in the modern world so it’s hard to escape but there’s always options.

Can someone post the nyt article on this??

I’ve bought Samsung for the past 5 years now and have never had an issue with bloat if you buy from Samsung. If you’re buying it from a carrier then yeah there’s probably a ton of crap preloaded. Imo Samsung just offers too much of a complete package to pass up. Pixel is good but hardware leaves some to be desired. The cute software quirks just don’t make it up for me.

Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, “which is illegal in the EU.” Lol

The problem in the US is that the iPhone has a huge amount of the market and iMessage mostly does that already. For Android to counter that you have to use a 3rd party app, which further fractures an already smaller market. Or everyone could just use sms which is free with basically every plan nowadays, which gets you by.