Buying Samsung for your business? You’d get faster service at Home Affairs during Stage 6

Listen, if you are a South African business owner or IT Admin thinking about rolling out Samsung devices for your staff or bakkies, do yourself a massive favor: Stop right now, turn around, and go look at Apple or Lenovo.

We bought a fleet of brand new Samsung Galaxy tablets for our drivers. To manage them properly and lock them down, Samsung forces you to use their proprietary "Samsung Knox" enterprise portal. Sounds lekker, right? Wrong.

To actually use the management software for the hardware you already paid them for, you have to apply for an admin account and wait for an invisible, outsourced compliance team to "approve" you.

I app**** 15 days ago. My account is still sitting on "Pending Approval." We have trucks sitting idle waiting for these tablets, and Samsung is holding our entire deployment hostage because someone in a cubicle somewhere won't tick a box.

Want to contact support to fix it? Eish, here is the best part: You can’t log a support ticket because your account hasn't been approved yet. It is a bureaucratic Catch-22 that makes the e-Toll system look like a well-oiled machine. You literally cannot speak to a human. You just shout into the void while your expensive hardware gathers dust.

They will gladly take your Rands at the till, but the second you need enterprise support, Samsung absolutely does not give a single #$%#.

Save your sanity. Buy Lenovo tablets that use standard Android Enterprise without the Knox bouncers, or just swallow your pride and pay the Apple tax for iPads. Apple might be expensive, but at least they answer the damn phone.