This year’s Galaxy Note 5 is an outstanding device – combining power with grace, and utility with handsome looks – but it also has a pretty major design flaw. The phone’s stylus can be inserted into its silo in both orientations, which is a change from previous S Pen designs, and one of those orientations can result in permanent damage to the Note’s functionality. If you are unfortunate enough to slide your S Pen in the wrong way, you’ll have a hard time unjamming it from the slot (though eventually you should be able to pry it away), but more importantly, you might disable the Note’s stylus detection feature. It’s a big problem that can result from a very small mistake. Samsung has now issued a response, and well, the answer is that you should read and adhere to the manual.
Grab the pitchforks everyone, we got ourselves ‘nother -gate!
I can’t believe they shipped this thing with this design flaw, especially since it’s so easy to fix: just make the ‘wrong’ end of the stylus a little bit wider so you can’t stick it in the wrong way et voilà , problem fixed.
Samsung’s response is silly. They should’ve said “we’re replacing all Note 5 styluses with a newer model that can’t be inserted the wrong way around, and all damaged devices will be replaced free of charge”.
And done.
Stick the stylus in backwards?
You’re holding it wrong!
Way better meme… ‘You’re sticking it in wrong!’
That’s what she said?
She did? 😐
Upside down, not backwards. Orientation of the pen matches the orientation of the phone, which has a front, back, left, right, top, bottom.
Backwards would mean the tip is pointing down, but you’ve rotated the pen 180 degrees away from you.
Hard to just make the end of the pen bigger since the end still needs to get into the hole in order to be pushed in all the way. There is probably a fix, but it likely will need to involve the phone as well. Either way an engineering fix would be months out and they probably have thousands of phones made.
An engineering mistake IMO, not a customer service one. Their options are limited at this point.
It’s worth noting that all the previous models have the “eraser” end of the stylus fattened, making it impossible to stick into the slot that direction.
Also, it’s been pointed out to me that with this model, the stylus enters from the bottom of the phone, so you have to remember to flip it around so it goes point first. Previous models, the stylus entered from the top, so you remove it and replace it in the orientation you’re going to use it.
Actually, on my 1st gen Note the pen is also at the bottom, not the top. It is absolutely impossible to put it in the wrong way without completely demolishing the phone, though.
Yup bottom on my Note 3 as well.
Worth noting the eject mechanism seems to be on the end of the stylus now, where as mine is inside the phone.
There’s a video on TWiT where Leo is talking about this issue, and ends up finding out just how easy it is to put the stylus in backward and get it stuck. He figured there would be some resistance to let him know to stop pushing, but there wasn’t any.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQB0TFcdFIs
One of the most important principles in usability engineering is that when something goes wrong, you blame your design, not the user. I guess Samsung has never hired any industrial engineers, at least not any good ones.
this isnt the engineers, this is the support/marketing/lawyers.
And this is why I want a Chinese Xiaomi phone. Living in South Korea makes me hate those low quality over-sized Samsung’s smartphone products even more.
Once again Samsung are copying Apple.
In the case of a major engineering failure, blame the users for holding/using it wrong.
Apple will be suing them again for blatantly lifting a design patent for customer service.
Edited 2015-08-27 09:08 UTC
I just hope both Apple and Samsung beat each other to death and let other companies do the innovations.
They get paid to say what open source developers say all the time, for free?
I worked for both IBM and NCR education divisions. The first consideration for bugs or design flaws was always “change the manual”. Looks likes Apple and Samsung are taking a page from a very old book!
Well, those old NCR documents make a lot more sense to me now …
Look how authentically digital the pen is when there’s no cluttering pointless extra forms that would only make it hard to use. Mistake-proofing and testing designs is so last century thinking. The pen goes in tip first, obviously, because its the vision of a millenial UX designer. She may be fresh from art school, but her vision can’t be compromised.
/S
Gangnam style~!!
‘Samsung’s response is silly. They should’ve said “we’re replacing all Note 5 styluses with a newer model that can’t be inserted the wrong way around, and all damaged devices will be replaced free of charge”.
Not quite correct, how are you going to make the hole bigger? unless you can accept the stylus sticking a half inch out of the bottom of the phone.