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Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by criley2 on Thursday September 26, 2013 @12:42PM (#6451918)
Features =/= Crapware

Apple was not paid by a third party to include it's own software features.

Game Center is like S Voice, a first part developed software that is billed as a "Feature".

Apple has no equivalent to "Pizza Hut" bookmarks that can't be deleted, because they control their carrier relationships better than Samsung who is willing to give their partners the freedom to install and screw up what they want.

Fortunately, Samsung is generally pretty good about letting us users have custom roms, which IMO trumps the Apple advantage for us power users. A custom rom > non-bloated default iOS, to me.

Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by onebaddude on Thursday September 26, 2013 @09:15PM (#6454666)
>Features =/= Crapware

"Feature" is just semantics, then.

I'll take a pizza ad over Game Center opening up and asking me to make an account every time I play a game, thanks. But unlike the Apple die-hards, I can admit that both a utter crap.

Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by zarify on Thursday September 26, 2013 @09:48PM (#6454780)
Actually I think that post-Game Center games are much better behaved. Remember what it used to be like to OpenFeint and whatever the other one was that I don't remember the name of? That was far more obtrusive before Apple put in their own version and everyone started using that instead.
Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by criley2 on Friday September 27, 2013 @11:29AM (#6457472)
>I'll take a pizza ad over Game Center opening up and asking me to make an account every time I play a game, thanks. But unlike the Apple die-hards, I can admit that both a utter crap.

I totally agree and Google's forced G+ integration with the newer G+ Games services is very frustarting too.

No G+ I do not want your crappy me-too social network attached to my gaming apps.

But as is generally the case, I imagine people will hate Apple and love Google for doing the same business practice...

Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by rrreese on Friday September 27, 2013 @03:23AM (#6455728)
>>Apple was not paid by a third party to include it's own software features.

I'll point you to the Apple weather app with the prominent Yahoo! link at the bottom left. This would be more tolerable if the app itself wasn't terrible. I really wish I could delete Apple's apps, why not come with them installed and let you remove and re-add, say like podcasts.

Re:The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked by ce4 on Friday September 27, 2013 @03:02AM (#6455649)
Samsung is not pretty good regarding community support, here's an in depth story from a former CyanogenMod maintainer for Samsung's Exynos4 based devices (S2/S3/Note/Note2/etc) [1].

For example, emergency calling functionality was broken for a long time and has been reverse engineered only recently [2].

[1] https://plus.google.com/101093310520661581786/posts/aoAGK5yo... [2] http://www.androidcentral.com/cyanogenmod-fixes-emergency-ca...