Similar to the one in Sydney, Samsung has opened a Galaxy Studio at Federation Square, and I think it'll be around until mid-October.
If you want to play with some of Samsung's latest gadgets, then it's a pretty good way to do it. I went during my lunch break, and some of the booths were pretty busy - in particular the VR and Samsung Fitness booths, but the phone, 360 camera, dex and wearable booths were all free.
If you are into getting free stuff, you can get a Samsung bag drawstring or tote bag with a bottle of water and A5 notebook if you visit one booth in each of the three areas. Oh, and there's a Kiis booth (the radio station) on one of the higher levels of Fed Square, and they have a competition running as well, but I didn't go there as I had to get back to work.
Oh, and there was also free coffee, if you're into that, and into waiting in a line (I'm not sure what time the coffee cart closes). The line seemed pretty short, I can't speak to the quality of the coffee as I didn't bother.
My only reason for going was to see an explosion of a Samsung Note 8. Firstly, that thing is massive. Here it is compared to my Kindle.
It was actually pretty hot when I picked it up, so I was kinda worried. I asked one of the staff members about it, and he had a pre-canned response about how the issues with the Note 7 have caused Samsung to be a lot more careful about the quality of their phones and they now go through a much more rigorous testing process. Even though I'm sure he has been asked the question hundreds of times by now, he was really nice about it and we chatted for a bit about quality assurance. He actually has a Note 8 himself - the only person working there that I talked to who owned a Samsung product.
I did like the post-processing background blur feature of the phone.
Which might be really hard to tell from those two photos, and it seems to only really work well when the foreground image is of a person / people. But I think you can do that in Photoshop anyway, if you really wanted to, so it's not really worth buying a whole new phone over.
I thought the Gear Fit 2 was nice, it's a lot fancier than my Mi Band 2 - although it is a lot bigger and the battery life isn't as good (more than a month for the Mi Band 2, and 4 days for the Gear Fit 2).
I asked the guy at the booth whether it synched with Google Fit, and he wasn't sure. A quick Google search says that you need an app to sync between Google Fit and the Samsung Fitness app, but it is possible. Not that annoying, but the 4 day battery life was the real dealbreaker for me. I have enough trouble remembering to charge my phone, I like how low-maintenance the Mi Band 2 is.
The fitness section was used to show off their watches (both of them are wearing the Samsung Gear Sport).
I didn't see the appeal of a 360 camera.
They had some snowglobe thing that you could go inside, and it'd spin some plastic white rose petals around with black light for you to film yourself with a 360 degree camera.
(That is not me - the selfie life isn't really for me. Mini-side rant: I'm not opposed to the idea of a selfie. Since not everyone carries a tripod around with them, and if nobody else is there, then it's the only way to take a decent photo of yourself and something else. I just don't like the weird angle that most selfies are taken at, resulting in the photos looking a bit off. As my own personal attempt to reduce the number of bad-angle photos in the world, whenever I see people taking selfies, I offer to take a photo for them. I have about a 50% acceptance rate. I wonder how many of those people are worried that I'll steal their phone.)
The booth wasn't too crowded when I went (~11:30am), but one of my co-workers went after work, and said it was quite hot in there, so it sounds like it was a lot more crowded. Try to be strategic about when you go.
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