tldr

I’m a S20FE users that just switch my phone to S23 and I feel scammed by Samsung, not that because S23 isn’t a great phone, oh it’s not a perfect phone either, but the problem is that I use a supposed “flagship” experience phone for 2 years when it isn’t

Beware that this is a rant post, and this is not a suggested post for someone to read, if you have enough toxicity in your life, lets move on and skip this post

More details

What’s wrong with the old S20FE? there’s two answer for this

1. Exynos 990
2. My ignorance of it

I trust some reviewer that make a video of using this phone as a main phone for a day, unknowingly  that they get paid for it and maybe can’t give objective review from a phone, I trust some well known international reviewer knowing that they are using more efficient / powerful Snapdragon variant, and I can’t be more ashamed of this.

the thought process when I purchase that S20FE is: “what can go wrong with self made chipset, yes the benchmark show lower score than the snapdragon variant, but it’s the newest chipset, it can’t be worse than some mid range phone, right? even apple doing a great job with it’s own chipset” I also expect some better performance because the phone and the chipset are made by the same company.

Oh how wrong I am, the end result is a battery sucker - hand warmer - ear burner - glitchy smartphone. from I can’t run high end game on this smoothly to I burn my ear when i take a call under sunlight.

I can understand if it still can’t run high end game, I don’t game that much on a phone anyway, but to get my phone get so hot from daily normal usage is … baffled, how is it so different from what the reviewer tell me? how can a company release a product this bad and get away with it.

Well.. no, they don’t get away from it, from they acknowledge the problem, Samsung going with Snapdragon chip in South Korea for the Galaxy S20, the shame of not releasing internally created chipset on their own home country,  on 2021 they decide to release Exynos version on their home, but the reviewer country (US) still got Snapdragon variant, but the trust isn't there anymore. Galaxy S21 series are lower than S20, S10 sales. On 2022, they released S22 Snapdragon version on Indonesia, but the European market still got Exynos version and finally they scrape Exynos on 2023’s S23 altogether, there’s no Exynos 2300 for 2023 to the point where their profit plumeted because of the low demand for the chip and lower profit margin of using Snapdragon variant. which force their hand to come back to Exynos for their next flagship.

I prided myself as one of those who appreciate technology advancement and not over fanatic / hate on some “brands”, I like to compare one technology brand to another and make my own opinion over that, if the next Exynos are doing great, than good for them, I love to see competition in the market, if it can be more efficient or powerful than Snapdragon variant, when I need to switch my phone again, I’m not afraid to use Exynos again, but in my opinion, a big company like Samsung which decide release “failed product” is worse than apple who make a closed product. They are the largest seller of android phones. I can’t laugh at apple decision to make people unable change back cover from third party without some feature disabled when the finished product I got from Samsung is “failed” in the first place, yes there’s a good thing from S20FE, it took beautiful photo and video, but that’s it.

How to fix this relationship

Nothing broken, really. I realize that part of this is also my mistakes, I trust some people that I shouldn’t and I don’t do my research, I even purchase another phone from the same brand when I vow to not doing so

for others and myself to avoid the same issue in the future, I would recommend some extra things to do: go to the phone subreddit / forums (open forums, not that closely controlled Samsung member) and find out what people opinion on that phone, we will get subjective point of view from people who use that as a daily driver

For Samsung, it will be nice to not release a worse variant on a region and using a same series name, either you sell both variant on all region and don’t use the same series name or be brave and sell your own chipset on all region

For local big name reviewer, please be as objective as possible, I know Exynos - S20FE isn’t good, but I haven’t find even one reviewer to told me so. and please be careful for the wording, I just feel worse when the S23 is giving another level of flagship experience. yet some big reviewer try to sell that experience on S23FE series with “flagship” word - courtesy this articel on how to make a smartphone a flagship from mediatek

no, S23FE is not a flagship, and never will be