 This week, Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S10 and the S10 Plus, and also an S10e, and probably a 5G phone, and they're probably gonna show off a foldable phone too, and maybe some smartwatches. Yeah, it's a lot. And I'm sure they're all gonna have beautiful hardware and be fast and have good cameras. But here's a question. What about the software? Can Samsung make a good user interface? You know the story with Samsung phones, right? Absolutely amazing hardware. This right here is the Galaxy S9, and even a year after it's been released, I think you could still say it's the nicest looking and feeling Android phone that you can get. But ever since, well, forever, we've always just made fun of Samsung's software, and it was easy to do, right? It just felt less elegant than so-called pure Android. And literally every time we review a Samsung phone, we say, hey, you know what? The software is a little bit better, but it's still, you know, Samsung. Now though, Samsung is finally releasing Android 9 Pie on the Galaxy S9, and it has this new interface called One UI. And I gotta tell you, it's pretty good. The core idea in One UI is that we all have big phones now, and so it's hard to reach the top of the phone. So Samsung took an idea from Apple and iterated on it. It started putting these big phones and iterated on it, and started putting these big headers here at the top of the app when you first open them, like here in Messages. It makes it easier to reach the stuff at the bottom of the screen, but then when you start scrolling, the header moves up and your content takes up the entire screen. You can actually see the whole progression just through the clock app. It starts with this try-hard attempt to clean up Android, then they dial it back, then they go super neon try-hard here, then they dial it back again, and then finally with One UI, they have an original idea and they execute it well. See, to me, there's a difference between a gimmick and a feature. When you see this big header thing, at first it definitely feels like a gimmick, but then you use it and it feels natural and normal. You barely even notice it, and that's the difference. A gimmick says, hey, look at me, look at me, and I'm a big new thing, but a feature just makes your phone better without you having to think about it or even necessarily notice it. It wasn't always this way with Samsung software. In fact, it was almost always bad and gimmicky, which means that, friends, it's time to talk about TouchWiz. So, TouchWiz. You know it as an Android skin. It takes so-called pure Android and it muddies it up with all this other crap on it that you don't really need or like or even want. But did you know it didn't actually start on Android? It started as a Windows Mobile skin. Yeah, it's that old. And so here's the thing. I can't believe I'm doing this, but I'm gonna kinda defend TouchWiz. Windows Mobile and the early iterations of Android, they were just not that great. The interfaces were kind of bad and you had to be a kind of computer dork to understand how they work. So Samsung just needed to try to clean them up and make them a little bit easier to use and maybe prettier in the bargain. But, well, it all went wrong in a hurry. For one thing, Samsung didn't really come up with its own ideas. It just sort of made bad Android versions of what it thought people wanted, which was iPhones. So TouchWiz made Samsung phones into this weird, franken, not quite iPhone mess. Also, and I'm just gonna say it, the design of TouchWiz lacked taste. It was just kind of ugly and not very elegant. And on the Galaxy S3, guess what it did by default? It made this bloop noise every time you touched it. Bloop, bloop, come on, bloop. Oh, and Samsung had heard that you like features, so it put features on top of other features. It felt like it had to differentiate its phone so it just kept on cramming stuff in. Eye tracking that didn't really work, and bloatware, and weird photo sharing features that only worked with other Samsung phones. It was just a confusing mess. Yeah, this isn't much of a defense, is it? The point, though, is that Samsung did have the right idea. It just did a horrible job of executing on it. And while it was trying to fix all that, it attached a whole lot of other bad ideas on top of the first bad ideas until it all became a bloated mess. TouchWiz was bad enough that Samsung finally realized that people hated it and stopped even calling it TouchWiz. They changed it to the Samsung Experience a little while ago, which, by the way, sounds like the worst band name ever. But now they have this new thing, which they're calling One UI. Let's talk about skins. One UI isn't really a skin, because there's no such thing as pure Android anymore, not in the phone that you buy. The basics of AOSP Android, they're really, well, basic, so everybody has to customize on top of it to make a good phone these days. Yes, even Pixel phones, they have the Google Experience on top of them. So One UI is now Samsung Experience, and you know what? I kinda dig it. There's still a million weird settings and features everywhere. There's Slide Over Here, which I thought I'd hate, but I don't. And Samsung lets you change the main buttons to swipe up gestures so you can reclaim a little bit of screen real estate. Also, Dark Mode and Samsung apps, they beat Google to it, and it's really nice. I think the S10 software is gonna be a lot like the One UI Experience on this S9 here, and again, I'm kind of into it. But there's still a problem, software updates. It took Samsung four or five months to get Android 9 Pie on the S9, and that's bad. Like, really bad. Supposedly, Google's new Project Treble system was supposed to modularize the OS to make updates come faster, but Samsung just isn't doing that. Also, Bixby. Oh, Bixby, you. If Samsung can fix that update problem, I could really get behind the One UI. For one, its aesthetic just looks better. It doesn't look cheap and like crap anymore, and that goes a long way. Second, I think Samsung is starting to figure out how to include a million features without having them all be super annoying. Like here in the camera app, it kind of progressively shows you the new features as you need them instead of confusing you with all of them right away. Although, I do gotta say, Samsung, you do gotta chill out with the Samsung Health app. I don't want it. Quit showing it to me. Anyway, most importantly, Samsung seems to have its own ideas instead of just trying to copy everybody else's or paper over the problems in Android. It has an identity that's all its own in its software. The software here, it feels like a Samsung phone, and that is surprisingly better than you might assume. But I just can't get over the fact that part of Samsung's identity is apparently making us all wait way too long to get software updates. Hey everybody, thanks for watching. Have you checked out One UI? Let me know what you think down in the comments. Also, stay tuned to The Verge. We're gonna have hands-ons and live blogs and everything for Samsung's Unpacked event on February 20th.