Category: Samsung

There appears to be light at the end of the nightmare tunnel for Samsung.  T-Mobile announced yesterday that they, along with Sprint and Verizon, will resume sales of the Galaxy Note7 on Wednesday, October 5th here in the United States.  The resumption of sales ends a painful few months for the Korean manufacture who had to recall millions of Note7’s globally due to faulty batteries.  The new units have a completely new battery from a complete different manufacture.

Sprint and Verizon announced last Friday that they would be resuming sales of the device in their stores and online.  T-Mobile will be doing the same and they represent the first GSM carrier here in the United States to resumes sales.

For those of you who are Verizon customers who have the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, take a few minutes to check your phone for updates.  Verizon has started rolling out the June Android security update to the device and given it is a sub-200MB download, it should be available to pretty much everyone at this point.  The updated build is version MMB29M.N910VVRU2CPF3 for those keeping score at home.

Samsung has announced that starting this coming Thursday, June 16th, customers will be able to use Samsung Pay at a wide range of merchants throughout the country.  The announcement means that the contactless payment option from Samsung is now accepted in an ever increasing number of countries as phone-based, contactless purchases continue to gain momentum.

“Since the introduction of Samsung Pay last year, we have seen great momentum and experienced significant consumer adoption. Samsung Pay has redefined the way consumers pay and use their smartphones,” said Thomas Ko, Vice President and Global Co-General Manager of Samsung Pay at Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to bring this service to Singapore consumers and we hope to introduce value-added services to drive and lead innovation in mobile commerce, giving consumers a safer, smarter and better mobile wallet.”

Because of the way Samsung Pay works – leveraging Magnetic Secure Transmission – it can be accepted a significantly larger number of pay terminals than the likes of the NFC secure based Android Pay or Apple Pay.  It will even work on non-contactless terminals.  It’s a big leg up but, to this point, has only been available on Samsung devices.

For those of you who own the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 on the Verizon network, it is a good morning for you.  The carrier has begun rolling out the Android Marshmallow update for the tablet today, bringing the latest major version of Android to it.  The updated build, according to Verizon’s support site, is MMB29K.T817VVRU2BPE1 for those keeping score at home and it will come to you as an OTA update.  You can expect about a 1GB download which you will need to do via Wi-Fi and once you have the download, the installation will take about 20-30 minutes and require a reboot.

The roadmap of when Samsung is going to be releasing their Android Marshmallow updates to devices has been leaked, again, with some revised or clarified dates.  Phone Arena first posted on this earlier today and the news is good for those who have a wide range of Samsung phones from the past couple of years.  While the leak is by no means a 100% confirmation, it is an indicator of where they company is on development and which devices are going to see the update eventually.

Although it is only hitting Asia and Europe at the moment, the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is starting to see the Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 update roll out globally.  The update will bring the latest security updates to the phablet along with several other UI tweaks that are exclusive to Samsung.  While the South Korean company has made no official announcements – and they rarely do – it is expect that this update will roll out globally over the course of the next few days.