It is indeed a retarded design. As are the curved edges in my opinion, I find it impossible to hold the phone without a case and not have my palm touch the edges occasionally. Would be fixable with a setting to ignore presses on those edges but alas.
As far as the dreaded Bixby button, I’m remapping it using the utility Button Mapper Pro, which wasn’t free but is super cheap. With a little futzing it works great, and a short press of the Bixby button is now remapped to “back”, and a long press turns on my flashlight, which is super handy.
Incidentally the ability to turn on the flashlight with a button press whether my phone is asleep or not is one of the reasons I ditched iPhones. After being jailbroken and being able to map a long press of the home button to the flashlight, I couldn’t go back to having to look at my phone every time I wanted to turn on the flashlight, which I do like 20 times a day. And keeping an iPhone jailbroken is a fulltime job these days.
It did indeed break during the last major update, but if I remember right I just had to repeat the remapping process to fix it. Still though, Samsung is hardly willingly letting their users ditch that stupid Bixby monstrosity. I haven’t heard of a single person who uses Bixby, or who doesn’t cringe every time they inadvertently launch it, which is really often given the button’s positioning.
I’d buy a Pixel in a heartbeat if they’d only include a headphone jack. That’s really important to me and is one of the main reasons I ditched iPhones (along with easy access to the flashlight and the fact that they got busted crippling old iPhones). And I have to say having an SD card in my S9+ is kind of awesome. With a 256 gig card I can have my entire music collection in offline form, and unlimited storage for shooting videos.
