The Samsung Galaxy Gear, an Android-powered smartwatch that Samsung has been calling “the next big thing” in commercials, is officially a dud. Why? After BusinessKorea reported that Samsung has sold less than 50,000 units to date, Samsung quickly tried to spin the bad news by saying that it had in fact sold 800,000 units, making it the “most sold wearable watch available in the market place.”
Right. The only problem is that Samsung later confirmed that the 800,000 number was actually for units shipped, not sold, which is a big difference.
Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is ready to shake up the advertising world
Since Apple won a $1 billion lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement last summer, both companies have been fighting to determine how the ruling will actually unfold. In March of this year, the presiding judge for the case subtracted $450 million from what Samsung owed Apple due to the jury’s miscalculations for damages.
The Apple vs. Samsung retrial kicked off earlier this week in California court, and Apple requested an additional $380 in damages from Samsung on top of the $600 million already owed. Samsung believes it should only have to pay Apple $52 million for infringing on five patents related to the iPhone.
Today Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, took the stand in court to talk about the iPhone’s importance to Apple, calling it a “bet-the-company” product. He also got pretty snarky about Samsung copying Apple.
Schiller began his testimony by recounting the original iPhone’s launch and the product’s success to date. He expressed frustration that Samsung started making phones that looked just like the iPhone after Apple started seeing success in the smartphone market. Schiller said he was “quite shocked” when he first saw the Samsung Galaxy. “My first thought was, ‘They’ve copied the iPhone.'”
These first few years of the iPhone’s existence have been “an incredibly important time” for Apple, said Schiller. And Samsung’s infringement has made it “harder for us to get new customers and bring them into our ecosystem.” The iPhone is Apple’s biggest money-maker by far. “At this point, it’s fair to say that most everyone at Apple works on iPhone,” said Schiller from the stand. “It’s our biggest product.”
While being cross-examined by Samsung’s lawyers, Schiller gave off a little Jobsian snark with his responses:
Schiller on Samsung gaining while other android makers lost share. “One is copying. the other are not copying… as much.” #icourt
With the new Mac Pro, Apple has proven its serious about bringing at least some manufacturing back to the States. The next step, though, is chips, and a new report says that Apple is bringing chip fabrication of its A-series chips stateside at a new $6 billion facility in upstate New York. And Samsung is said to be involved.
What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.
A judge has advised Samsung to prepare its defense after determining that the South Korean company probably violated a court order by leaking confidential Apple documents.
Apple provided Samsung with copies of its patent agreements with Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp, and Philips as part of the massive patent battle between the two that started last summer, but it seems the company ignored the protective order that said the information could only be used in the context of that case.
Apple’s iPhone 5s became the world’s first smartphone with a 64-bit processor when it launched this September, but as you might expect, it’ll have plenty of competitors next year. Unsurprisingly, some of those will come from Samsung, which is already planning 64-bit chips and 16-megapixel cameras for its 2014 flagships, according to industry sources.
Drumming up iBusiness on Nathan Road in Hong Kong.
I’m still a little woozy from the 14-hour plane ride from San Francisco, but at first glance this humming tech hub seems like Samsung territory.
For every 10 Galaxy Notes that metro riders are stumbling down the endless escalators watching TV shows or reading comics on, I’ve probably spotted one iPhone.
Apple has topped the list of world’s most valuable brands for the third straight year in a row, and is now worth almost twice as much as any other brand on the planet, Forbes reports. The Cupertino company is now valued at $104.3 billion, up 20 percent over last year, which puts it way out in front of Microsoft, Samsung, and even Google.
Will flexible, bendable smartphone screens ever become a reality? Samsung thinks so. In fact, if you ignore the hysterically douchetastic concept video they are using to promote the foldable Galaxy tablets of the future, Samsung says we should have folding displays on the market by 2015.
It might have been the unsaid mission statement for quite some time, but now top executive Shin Jong-kyun has puts his cards on the table, telling analysts that after overtaking Apple in smartphones, Samsung aims to be the world leader in tablet computers, too.
Shin noted that Samsung tablet sales will exceed 40 million units this year — more than doubling the sales in 2012.
“Samsung tablet shipments started to grow remarkably since the second half of last year,” he said.
Many people would have you believe that Apple is successful not because their products are superior, but because they’re advertising is. They actually have a point, but not in the way they mean. Yes, Apple’s advertising is superior, but it’s not because Apple spends loads on it. In fact, Apple’s advertising budget is far tinier than Microsoft and Samsung’s.
The iPhone 5s wasn’t the first smartphone to offer a fingerprint scanner, but it’s undoubtedly the most popular one to date. In fact, it’s so popular that Touch ID is now driving massive growth in the smartphone fingerprint scanner market, with sales of fingerprint scanning handsets expected to reach 525 million units in 2017.
Apple was bested by Samsung in the results of J.D. Power’s latest tablet customer satisfaction survey, marking the first time that Apple hasn’t come out ontop in the rankings in over two years.
Samsung was the only tablet manufacturer to improve its score since the last survey was released in April by jumping from a 822 to a score of 835, even though it finished third behind Apple and Amazon in the last survey. Apple ranked second in the latest survey with a score of 833 with strong scores in both performance and ease of use.
Following on from the news that Samsung shipped 2.6x the number of smartphones that Apple did last quarter, new figures released by research firm IDC show that Samsung tablet shipments grew by 123% to 9.7 million tablets over the same period. While Apple still leads the way with 29.6% of the tablet market, this is down considerably from the 40.2% share the company captured during this same quarter last year. Samsung meanwhile holds a company record 20.4% of the market, while Asus holds 7.4% (representing a 53% year on year increase). The two biggest growth companies for tablets are Acer and Lenovo — with their shipments increasing 346% and 420% respectively to represent 0.9% and 1.1% of the overall market.
If you switched from an iPhone to an Android-powered smartphone because you felt a 4-inch display was just too small, then Apple may give you a reason to switch back next year. Several industry experts are predicting that the Cupertino company will step up its pursuit of high-end Android smartphones by finally introducing a larger 5-inch display with the iPhone 6.
A Google smartwatch powered by Android with built-in Google Now is in the late stages of development, according to people familiar with the matter, who have been speaking to The Wall Street Journal. Google is now in talks with Asian suppliers, which could begin mass producing the device “within months.”
Although Apple is still (very) profitably plugging along with the iPhone, there’s a new king of smartphones, and it’s Samsung. The Korean gadget maker continued to dominate smartphone sales in the third quarter, shipping over 88 million smartphones this quarter compared to just 33.8 million iPhones shipped. And it gets worse for Apple.
Samsung has struck a $100 million deal with the NBA that will see its tablets and televisions used courtside during games. The deal is seen as a strategic move that could expand the global reach of both parties, shoving Samsung’s logo and devices into the faces of NBA fans, and putting NBA content into the hands of Samsung’s customers.
Samsung has been fined $340,000 by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission for an Internet campaign against HTC that violated fair trade rules. The South Korean company paid students to praise its own smartphones in online reviews while slamming those of rival HTC.
When you’re the head of one of the nation’s four largest mobile carriers, you’ve got access to a lot of phones. You’ve probably got to try them out all the time. But do you ever have access to so many phones that you forget which is which, or that the iPhone in your hand is not, in fact, a Samsung Galaxy phablet?
Samsung looks to be preparing its own extended warranty plans that will provide additional coverage for its smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics, according to a new trademark registered with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
Called “Protection Plus,” the service is expected to offer the same kind of protection that is available to iPhone, iPad, and iPod users with AppleCare+.
Apple has gone and topped the J.D. Power rankings for smartphone satisfaction. Again.
This marks the tenth straight time Apple has dominated the likes of Nokia, Samsung, HTC, and Motorola in the bi-annual poll, and with the iPhone 5s shattering sales records on opening weekend, the streak looks like it might continue for some time.
This year’s survey included a breakdown of smartphone satisfaction by carrier for the first time ever and revealed Verizon customers are slightly happier with the iPhone than those on AT&T, with scores of 861 and 856 respectively.
When you’re browsing the web on your mobile, prepare to stumble across new popups that bash the smartphone you’re using.
LG, together with advertising agency M&C Saatchi, has designed intelligent new ads that find out what smartphone you’re using to take trolling to a new level. They’ll pick common faults with your iPhone, your Galaxy S4, or your HTC One — and then tell you why the LG G2 is better.
Given Samsung’s habit of shamelessly copying everything Apple does, I wasn’t at all surprised to see this morning’s report that the South Korean company had just spent $650 million on a fingerprint scanning firm called FingerPrint Cards. In fact, I simply rolled my eyes when I saw the news and thought, “there’s a surprise.”
But it appears that the whole thing was completely fabricated. The press release that went out announcing the move was false, and both Samsung and FingerPrint Cards have denied the acquisition.
