[masraum]

Originally Posted by john70t

I need PC-compatability so lovely Apple is not an option.

I've only got a PC, it's almost 7 years old and I've had an iphone for going on 3 years now. The brand of the phone has little to do with the PC that you use.

Questions:
1). If I bought that phone from ATT do I also need a Samsung and Google account as well as the ATT account?
Those are just manufacturers. Can I just skip those without registering?

Samsung makes Android-based phones (Android is the operating system, similar to saying IOS (iphones), Windows, Linux or OSX (apple computers). For ANY & ALL Android based phones you will have to have a gmail account (Android is a Google product, so you have to have a google login (gmail = google mail) to use an Android device.

You will NOT need any sort of Samsung account as far as I know unless something has changed since I had Android phones.

2). Is there that much difference between the S7 and S8, besides harder glass?
I don't want iris recognition or any of that personal info floating around on the 'net.
I would ditch fingerprint recognition but they would have that anyway.
It also looks like the J7 does not have GPS so my personal pictures might not get geo-tagged.

I'm not sure on the difference between the two. I would guess that there may be memory and processor differences (usually newer phones have better processors and possibly more memory. I don't think the fingerprint thing is the kind of fingerprints that the govt would want or use, so I don't really think there'd be much use to those for anyone. I would be pretty surprised if any device didn't have some sort of GPS capability. Every phone that I've had and/or considered or read about in the last 10 years has had some sort of GPS capability.

3). Can you just plug the USB cord into a laptop/storage and transfer over pictures?
Or do those need to be uploaded into a registered cloud account and then download it back from the cloud?
I need to protect the future market rights on my leaked pon videos with Kate Bekinsale.

I've never seen any smart phone that didn't allow you to transfer via a USB cable.

[quote]4). Can you use any art stylus with any touch screen phone, or only the $700 GalaxyNote8?[quote]
I think it would depend upon the stylus and the phone. There are a couple of different types of touchscreen, capacitive and resistive. Most phones are capacitive, and wouldn't work with say your fingernail. Lots of places these days give away free pens that have a soft rubber bulb on the end that works as a stylus for smart phones. I think it would be fairly easy to find a stylus that would work, but not every one will.

5). Is all 'pre-installed software' locked in, or does the phone need to be jailbreaked/rooted/whatever?
I'd like to get rid of all da spam.
Supposedly half the RAM is used by that stuff.

I wouldn't worry too much about the memory util in most cases these days. Some of the pre-installed stuff is pretty locked in, but even Apple these days allows you to uninstall that stuff. I know that back in the day, Samsung and Motorola had a bunch of extra crap installed compared to the base Android software, but that's part of the reason that folks bought them. If you want a bare-bones Android system, then you probably have to buy whatever is going out as a google phone these days. https://www.google.com/nexus/
If I went back to an Android based phone (I was an Android fan-boy for a long time, and still think Android rocks), I'd go for a Nexus. I started with the Google G1, then I had the Google G2, then I had 1 or 2 HTC phones that I had very good luck with. Since Nexus is a Google phone and Android is the Google OS, the Nexus is probably one of the better supported Android phones that's out there.

quick google search for getting rid of bloatware on Samsung S8
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/samsung-galaxy-s8-guide,review-4330-3.html

I was an Android fan because in the beginning, the Android OS was more feature rich. It did more of what I wanted it to do. As Apple (iOS) and Android matured, the feature gap shrank and it got to be where you couldn't go wrong going either way (like Nikon vs Canon or Mustang vs Camaro, they are generally so close that it comes down to subjective preference other than one occasionally taking the lead in some way or another). The reason that I have an iPhone now, the feature that sold me on it, was that with an iPad, and an AppleTV and my wife having an iPhone and macbook air, the way that all of the Apple stuff works together is the big feature that sold me.