Last night, after several months of rumors and speculation, Samsung finally announced their 2012 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III. It’s a device that I’ve been telling everyone to wait for, telling everyone that it’s going to be the best Android handset to come out this year, telling everyone that buying any other smartphone would be a huge mistake. Now that the Galaxy S III is official, I have to admit that I was wrong, and I’m deeply sorry.
Got to love the alleged view of the UK mobile networks:
Citing an “extremely reliable” source, [Professeur Thibault] first goes on to address the absence of a Focus S equivalent in Europe which is apparently due to carriers’ unwillingness to stock a device that looks so similar to the Galaxy S II. If there were ever a good incentive to not be lazy with design for Samsung, that would be it…and it really does look to have gotten to them. The source goes on to say the leading OEM is ready to release new models this year for Europe and that, “they should be beautiful”.
My emphasis, via Windows Phone Daily.
…or maybe they’ve sold eleventy-million and one. That’s the problem when you don’t tell people your sales figures - we’ll start to make them up. Charles Arthur of The Guardian:
And yes, for journalists it is frustrating to be driven to roundabout language such as “believed to be the world’s largest smartphone seller”. I’m far from the only person to have been frustrated by this today; I know directly of two others on different publications who gnashed their teeth over precisely this topic and the misleading tweets from Samsung Mobile SA. If Samsung thinks it’s the world’s largest smartphone seller, then I’d like to at least have it on Samsung’s authority
David Gilson (moonlighting at Blottr instead of the All About family), talks about the current state of play in the Android world with the linkbaiting headline of “Is Android Doomed?”
Google has to walk a fine line of not being seen to give preferential treatment to Motorola Mobility, in order to stop the likes of HTC and Samsung quitting Android. So far it’s been doing a good job, by means of helping them to fight its proxy patent war against Apple.
An interesting read…
It’s either (a)
Gavin Kim moves from Samsung to Microsoft because it’s a better job for him, it’s better for his family, and he wants to try something new.
…or (b)
Samsung know Android is dead, that all the lawsuits will kill it, and we don’t want to be beaten by Nokia again, so why not drop one of our VP’s into the top levels of Windows Phone so when we do decide to switch we’ll get preferential treatment and not be left behind.
Gotta love some of the geekerati commentary this morning.
Koh frequently remarked on the similarity between each company’s tablets. At one point during the hearing, she held one black glass tablet in each hand above her head, and asked Sullivan if she could identify which company produced which.
“Not at this distance your honor,” said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.
“Can any of Samsung’s lawyers tell me which one is Samsung and which one is Apple?”
I hope the defence team like movies about gladiators.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 (from O2, as you’ll recall here, here, and here) has been earning its place in my gadget bag now, and two recent trips around the UK have seen me carry the Tab into areas with poor mobile phone coverage, and rather limited access to Wi-Fi: namely a caravan holiday in the north of England with minimal GSM coverage and not a hope of punching a data signal through; and the recent Over the Air conference where the volume of devices, hackers and power users in such a confined space swamped both the Wi-Fi network and the cellular capacity. How did it cope? As well as it was designed to, which is unfortunate.
Android is very much built on the idea of always having a data connection available to the device, and while it is relatively frugal with the amount of data used, it does want to use the data. Opening up applications that use the cloud (for example DropBox or the Kindle app) and there’s an immediate reaching out to sync and check everything is okay.
Thankfully these apps will fall back gracefully to an offline position, and that’s the case for most of the code on the device (certainly for the built-in applications), but my issue isn’t that a lack of internet connectivity stops the device running, it’s that a lack of internet connectivity drops the productivity of the Tab by a significant factor.
The reason in my mind is simple - Android as an Operating System has been designed with the assumption that it will be online. When decisions were made, they were weighted to being a connected device. And that has percolated through the ecosystem. Where I’ve found the Tab to be a strong device has been talking to social networks like Facebook and Foursquare, when working with my various blogs to post and manage interaction, to get to and reply to my email, and (arguably) it’s the best way to consume Google+ content.
All of which are tools that ate suited to online work. Put that aside and start looking for more ‘computery’ tasks like a Word Processor and you start to struggle.
None of this makes the Tab wrong in any way, but it does bring in to focus the use cases that were considered both when making the Tab, but also Android. So much of the Tab is “stock” Android that you can’t help feeling that it’s a big phone, as opposed to a small tablet. And that means the vision of what Google feel Android is drives the Tab.
If you fit into that definition, then there;s every chance that the Tab works for you. I always maintain that you need to be able to ask yourself what you want a device to do before you can know which to get - it’s that or buy them all and see which one fits in after lots of experimenting.
The Tab 7 does have a place in the world, and it’s not the same place as the iPad (or even the Tab with the 10.1 inch screen). For me, it’s a great tool for reporting in situ. The large screen makes text input easy, and looking over the social media networks, blogs and websites is a breeze. It’s not something I would rely on to cover an event single-handed, but it could do the job in a push. But it does need that connection, so the event better be in a built up area. There’ll be no coverage of “One Man And His Dog” from this mobile device.
The Tab 7 is not an all-rounder, that much is clear from the travels. Think of it as a closing pitcher, when you need a certain job done, you know that you have this ready to go.
Back in February, a huge number of people wondered why Nokia went with Windows Phone 7 and not Android. Here’s another reason to add to the rather obvious business cases that were pointed out after Feb 11, and it’s all to do with Samsung.
Today, Samsung announced they would be paying Microsoft a per-device royalty on all their Android devices. And the per-device Android fee handed to Microsoft is more than the per-device cost of licencing Windows Phone 7. There’s a potential fiduciary argument that Windows Phone is now cheaper than Android.
Starter for ten, how much are Nokia paying per Windows Phone they sell? Well it’s “significantly lower than for other Windows Phone licensees” (AAS) and Nokia are receiving ”substantial payments” from Microsoft in regards to their IP. There’s no hard and fast numbers out there but I bet the balance sheets, at least for the next two or three years, are going to be in Nokia’s favour on that per-device cost.
Nokia and Stephen Elop were always playing the long game, and it’s starting to bear fruit.
Or more specifically the right to use certain patents on their Android devices, which Microsoft will now collect a per-device royalty. And here’s me thinking that Google buying Motorola Mobility was meant to strengthen Android against this sort of thing…
…have been shipped to retailers warehouses. Now, didn’t we go through all this smoke and mirrors with the Galaxy Tab? And aren’t we still waiting on an official “Tabs sold” number instead of “Tabs shipped”?
I get the feeling that Samsung aren’t considering an open source path for Bada to try to get other manufacturers to use it, but more as a great big red flag to the rest of the industry that they are a serious company and not some OEM ready to licence whatever the flavour of the month is.
