Business

If you own a Galaxy S4, Samsung might owe you $10 for lying about its benchmarks

You’ll need to be located in California to get the money, however.

by
Joe Rice-Jones
October 3, 2019

Image: Samsung

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If you can still remember 2013, the Galaxy S4 was the undisputed Android king. Well, at least until Samsung was caught cheating on benchmarks to give itself an Edge (wait, the Edge was the year after that…). The upshot of that malpractice was a class action suit, which slowly wound its way through the courts until Samsung decided to settle.

The thing is, the settlement is so limited that it won’t stop Samsung from doing the exact same thing if they decide to.

Samsung owes Galaxy S4 owners some cash for cheating on benchmarks

The settlement is for just under $14 million dollars, but only $2.8 million is actually going to consumers. The rest goes to injunction relief. The thing is, there are some provisos here.

The settlement only affects “All persons or entities who purchased one or more 16 GB Galaxy S4 smartphones in the State of California from April 1, 2013 until July 31, 2013.” That makes the actual class action group around 280,000 people. That’s a pretty tiny percentage of the 80 million total Galaxy S4 sales worldwide. Guess it sucks to not live in California…

Samsung is also banned from manipulating benchmarks (or other apps) for a period of three years

Will Samsung re-offend after that period? Is the moon round? Do fish live in the sea? The ultra-competitive mobile market is full of tweaks to gain the upper-hand on the competition, so if it’s possible to do, it will be done.

What do you think? Surprised that Samsung was lying about its benchmarks? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.