I do like them though. But they did something I can never accept. I have two tablets and a phone that I use Samsung Notes on extensively. In order to have access to those notes when I’m on my PC I have also (stealthily) installed the Windows app on my Surface Go and SP3. However Samsung has now disabled Notes on non-Samsung devices. I have some 300+ notebooks I can no longer access on my PCs.
Samsung doesn’t decide what kind of ecosystem I prefer to setup and they sure as hell aren’t going to force me into their own system. Guess I need to study up on all those weird Chinese devices now.
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That does suck and seems pretty shortsighted.
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Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
There seem to be a workaround for you to at least access and backup your notebooks: Reddit - Dive into anything
Any particular reason it had to be Samsung note and not other note app? If you move to other device, you would need to switch app anyway so no need to throw away your Samsung devices and buy Chinese stuff for now.
But yeah that was an anti consumer move that they did. No one will buy an expensive Samsung laptop for a note App, and their laptop line up is super small and not get updated often ( and doesn’t even sell outside a few countries), so why try to be Apple.
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So possibly this is a non US market thing? Reason I ask is that as of this morning anyway, Samsung Note is still available in the Windows App store and in a very limited test, a sync between a Surface Pro 8 and Tab S8, it seems to work.
Sucks. And the sync with OneNote isn’t helpful at all.
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That sucks, but to be a bit insensitive…
That kind of outcome is pretty much inevitable.
It’s never a good idea to use proprietary software and file formats, and it’s important to come up with escape strategies if it can’t be avoided.
Macromedia Flash taught us that lesson, among other infamous examples.
I spent a couple frustrating and harrowing days a while back trying to re-access freakin’ Adobe PageMaker files so I could access some old book designs that I suddenly needed again. What an idiot I was not to save them in PDF format, or migrate them forward when it would have been easy! Instead I was going through dusty boxes of legacy hardware and CDRs and praying that my work still existed.
Side note: My only working CD reader, an external box, needed a weird male-to-male USB 2.0 cable to connect it to my laptop. Surely in my many boxes of crap I’d have one of those! But it’s a non-standard cable and the only one I managed to dig up was in fact the, now yellowed and slightly corroded, original cable which came with the drive. Windows recognized it with a sort of “Oh, you mean that old thing?” reluctance on the 5th attempt.
I can now sort of forgive NASA for letting their priceless Viking Mars mission tapes rot in storage out of neglect.
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Well, the files are still accessible on my Samsung devices. It has just becoma e whole lot more inconvenient, more than that it is Samsung’s attitude of policing software usage that grates on me. Basically I’ve paid for it twice through my Samsung tablets.
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Nope, just opened Samsung Notes on my Pro X, got a dialogue that says it only runs on Galaxy Books and it closed.
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Thank you for that tip and link. Downloaded the link to the older version and it is up and running right now, syncing all my old notebooks (haven’t opened one yet). My problem is the .bat file. Since I’m running Windows S (I know, I know) it won’t install since it isn’t coming from the Windows Store.
Can someone supply the content and I can write it in the Registry or wherever it is supposed to go?
So additional weirdness. I get that message on our lab Pro X but not on our Pro 8.
So two additional data points to that.
One the version number on the Intel Pro 8 is older ??? than the reported version that downloaded to the Pro X
Two, to my knowledge, there has never been a WOA version of notes though the X86 version did run under emulation AFAIK.
Regardless, I reached out to Samsung for clarification.
I’m hoping this isn’t some misguided attempt by Samsung to boost their own laptop sales, as outside of their home country, the market share is on the order of a rounding error, despite being overall IMHO, a fairly solid lineup of devices.
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Launched successfully on my Pro 8 too.
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You would probably have better luck asking on that subreddit. And from what i read, the bat file have to run at every start up because any change seem to get reverted once you restart, do it probably won’t be easy.
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So Samsung’s “official” response to us is that Notes was never supported on WOA to begin with. The reason that it no longer runs at all is due to code changes that MS made to a couple of key libraries in the X86 emulation code with the last major cumulative update.
At the present time, there are no plans by Samsung to release a WOA native version.
As an aside, our understanding is that Notes on the PC was actually subcontracted out and was not developed by Samsung directly.
And since this is Samsung we are talking about, this could all change if they decide to make another WOA device, though I think that’s unlikely, at least in the near term.
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But doesn’t this explanation contradict the info in the Reddit thread @crazycat linked? The OP says you can run the current version of Notes solely via registry hack.
Yepp, it took three days and now I am blocked from accessing my notebooks again. Interestingly it doesn’t happen on my SP3, probably because it is too old to update some of the libraries that Samsung Notes require to block users.
I believe the workaround was for x86 windows device. I believe the explanation Samsung gave was about WOA’s x86 emulation, which the majority of people doesn’t use.
@Kumabjorn did you disable automatic update when you reverted back to old version? Either your pc automatic update Samsung note to the new unusable version, or Samsung was so determined to block non Samsung pc user they block the old note version. The later seem less likely, but if it actually happens then it’s best to migrate your notes to another app.
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I looked for that in the App Settings but couldn’t find it. I run Windows 10 S on my Go, so it has some limitations. The odd thing from my viewpoint is that S only allows installing from the Windows Store. But apparently Samsung has som exception to that rule.
If Samsung had rich offerings globally available in the PC realm it wouldn’t bother me as much, but it is almost impossible to find a Samsung PC in Japan.