Samsung on Galaxy Note 5’s broken stylus slot: read the manual

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.

21 Comments

  1. 2015-08-26 7:08 pm
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