[Verizon Galaxy Note 4 General] VirgilWoods:
*This thread is about discussing the future of the Dev Edition as it pertains to the relationship between us and Samsung, and what we need from them. This thread will also contain official updates and information from my contacts at Samsung corporate.*

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm back home and able to respond again in regards to the DE situation. As you all know I had dedicated time to dealing with corporate on the matter of getting our phones in stock and working on other stretch goals such as software support. I told you all that Monday would be a good day but to be honest I had a feeling that we wouldn't have had our products shipped until Tuesday. I have a few ideas as to why this is the case, but more importantly I would like to emphasize and state something very important in regards to our participation in the developer program.

In all my dealings with the project managers and corporate wigs at Samsung I represented the cause on behalf of our community which no one there had heard of. I explained to them the importance and the legacy of XDA Developers, but most of all I made sure to tell them about the tight-knit community that helps each other out, the portal of people who band together in solidarity to raise support for developers, leaders, products. Most importantly I told them that not only does this credo bind us as a small group of users, but that the most important phone advancements come from communities like ours.

With that being said,

we have a prime opportunity to make history

by influencing their developer program in in a positive way. For that we need everyone to please be civil and respectful when dealing with Samsung customer service at the mobile accessories department. It is not their fault these phones were not ready to go out and they are willing to make it right. I say this as someone with an overnight order that not only didn't go out until today, but went out as ground shipping instead for Monday. There are hundreds of us, many calling in, and the last thing we need is to turn this into a clustercluck. The more positive we make this experience, the better.

I promised it would be a good holiday weekend with the Note 4 so take the time to enjoy it. The delay does push us back a bit on our goals. Tomorrow I will get to the bottom of this and hopefully get you an official explanation. Though we are delayed a bit, the volume of sales was larger than I expected initially which means that we now have a larger community. As one of

"The First 40"

from last month, we only had a couple of threads and not too much going on. I want to change that and so I will reach out to the mods and see if we can get our own space to collaborate and work together. This requires teamwork and participation as well as patience and a dash of happiness.

My contacts at Samsung see our numbers as leverage to get the things we really want, like support and original firmware as well as possible future updates. There's a lot riding on this so we can't mess it up. I can't delve into specifics about everything I've discussed with them but we may be looking at changing the way vendors officially view unlocked bootloaders and custom roms.

I've drawn up what in my experience is a good map of where to go from here with the product. If you have any input and information, this is the thread to add to the Developer Edition project pipeline. I can't believe we have to do the work for them and we aren't even paid for this, though someone's got to do it or else none of us are getting the full product experience we paid hundreds of dollars for.

Any questions/concerns/goal ideas/requests here. This should be a good starting map of where to go from here. It is imperative that we all have our units, and we all have the safety net needed to not brick our units which is why Goal 2 is so important. Then we can go on to have custom ROMs. We'll need to collaborate but for now we will enjoy the device this week and figure out what you'd like to see out of the future with Samsung and the dev program.

Sincerely,

Virgil Woods