Articles about Samsung

Nowadays, many people use smartphones as their main camera. This is smart, because your phone is always with you. Something important may happen when you least expect it, and a fancy standalone camera at your house will be of no use. Still, I see value in having a standalone unit, as they often take superior pictures and videos thanks to better sensors and larger lenses. Not to mention, many new smartphones do not have expandable memory, while most standalone cameras do.

Today, Samsung announces a downright sexy camera called the NX500. Not only does it feature 28 mega pixels, but it does 4K video too. In other words, this is a great solution for things like vlogging, YouTube and most importantly, family moments.

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Samsung Electronics, the digital gadget arm of the South Korean technology conglomerate, made $4.87 billion profit in revenue last quarter. It’s a huge number, but significantly lower than $7.7 billion profit the company made in the same period a year ago, and again, a lot less than the $8.27 billion profit from two years ago.

In terms of smartphone shipment, the company shipped 75.1 million smartphones last quarter, compared to 84.4 million from a year ago. As per IDC, the company’s market share dipped from 31 percent in 2013 to 24.5 percent by the end of 2014. What’s happening? Why has the company’s profit and shipment figures slumped down? Once the only mammoth in the smartphone world (by shipment figure), Samsung is slowly becoming irrelevant in the game. Here’s how.

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Perhaps you have seen such statement somewhere on the InterWebs sometime during the last couple of months and increasingly the past few weeks. It's a meme slowly growing -- and for good reasons. While others innovate, Apple iterates and succeeds unblushingly well. The company is mountains more successful today innovating less and taking fewer risks.

Apple is the new Microsoft, where maximizing margins matters more than innovation. Look how much more successful Apple is by being boring and following where innovators lead. Consider today's Strategy Analytics report that puts Apple and Samsung tied for calendar fourth-quarter smartphone shipments. Such scenario was all but unfathomable two quarters earlier. Yet the foundation laid long before Apple cofounder Steve Job's death, when logistics genius and now CEO Tim Cook managed day-to-day operations. Risk-to-innovation defined Jobs' management style. Cook is more tactical.

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Samsung is no longer the leading smartphone vendor. According to a new report from Strategy Analytics, Apple caught up with the South Korean maker in Q4 2014, thanks to a record number of iPhone shipments totaling 74.5 million units. The two players now share the top spot on the podium.

How did it come to this? Well, it's simple. Apple's shipments increased from 51 million units by 46.07 percent year-over-year, while Samsung's shipments decreased from 86 million units by 13.37 percent, each converging to 19.6 percent market share. Thanks to the strong performance shown by iPhones, iOS' market share rose also, to 19.6 percent from 17.6 percent a year prior, while Android's market share dipped slightly to 76.7 percent from 78.3 percent.

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Introducing a new platform comes with great challenges. It cannot successfully compete right away with established players, and it will take years to catch up. Gaining any real traction requires having lots of money to burn through, before turning a profit, let alone breaking even. The vast majority of consumers will be looking to buy the best products around, and emerging platforms do not often make the cut -- even longstanding players can struggle here.

So, it's a tough road ahead for Samsung as it tries to bring Tizen into mainstream. It is already used in some types of products -- like cameras and wearables -- but the real challenges come from popular categories, like smartphones. So far, Samsung only announced a Tizen-powered smartphone, but it didn't hit the market. Today, Samsung is at its second attempt, as it announces what is the first Tizen smartphone to actually hit store shelves. It's called Z1.

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Samsung has long been criticized for making smartphones that look and feel cheap. This has not only been the case with its low-cost offerings, but also with its mid-rangers and flagships -- you don't need to look further than the Galaxy S line -- which is supposed to be Samsung's cream of the crop in regards to design -- to understand the problem.

Fortunately, Samsung has paid attention lately, proof being the introduction of the A lineup as well as the design changes made for the Galaxy Note 4 flagship, which will trickle down to future premium offerings. And, today, Samsung is expanding the A lineup by adding the A7 phablet into the mix. It is the biggest, most powerful and thinnest of the bunch.

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Solid state drives are commonly used nowadays in premium ultrabooks, laptops and desktop PCs, mainly because they are faster and more energy-efficient, and run cooler than traditional hard drives. They are also favored by those who build their own PCs, and as aftermarket upgrades for older devices. SSDs are commonly connected using SATA, but, for the best results, PCIe is the better option.

So, naturally, Samsung has chosen to use PCIe with its latest SSD for ultra-thin laptops and workstations. Dubbed SM951, it promises lighting-fast performance, with speeds over 1000 MB/s, and excellent energy-efficiency, consuming less than 2mW in standby. It will be offered in 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB storage options.

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If you need a portable storage device, then are you are most likely looking to buy an external HDD. They are available in lots of sizes, and they are also pretty affordable. However, they are also slow. Too slow, I would say. So, if you need something that is fast -- that can transfer files quickly and open everything almost instantly -- then a portable HDD is not the answer.

However, a portable SSD would fit the bill just fine. On top of being faster, it will also be more energy-efficient and less sensitive to shocks. Targeting this crowd, Samsung today announced Portable SSD T1, which is about to hit store shelves in three storage trims. And it is so small and light, you can carry it in your pocket.

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It's been a common joke in the technology industry for many years that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

But whilst it may be a joke, in the past conflicting standards have led to very real issues when it comes to getting systems to work together. In the modern era when we increasingly expect things to 'just work' compatibility issues are becoming less acceptable.

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At the end of 2014, the Windows Phone landscape is dominated by low-end smartphones. Of the ten most popular devices that the platform has to offer, just two are high-end handsets -- however, neither is a current-day flagship. If it is not clear enough by now, Windows Phone is nothing more than a low-end affair, after more than four years down the road. Is that a bad thing?

Nokia Lumia 520 is the most-successful Windows Phone around, accounting for a whopping 25.4 percent of Windows Phones in use. Put differently, it is as popular as the following nine most popular Windows Phones put together. Altogether, the top ten makes up 67.2 percent share in this market, according to information revealed by AdDuplex.

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My colleague Alan Buckingham has already listed his favorite tech of the past year, and now it’s my turn. I’ve taken all sorts of new products for a spin over the past 12 months, so narrowing the selection down is actually pretty tricky. Apple disappointed me a little this year -- as the owner of an iPhone 5s I needed a big reason to upgrade to the iPhone 6, and a larger screen and Apple Pay wasn’t it. The iPhone 6 is an excellent phone, but I think I’ll hang on to the 5s for another year. Similarly, the iPad Air 2 just wasn’t different enough for me to consider that either. Thinner is a feature, not a benefit for me.

But fortunately, there was plenty of other new tech around that I did love, and here’s my top selection, in no particular order.

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Samsung has unveiled a new version of its Galaxy Note 4, featuring support for LTE Advanced Tri-Band Carrier Aggregation and Category 9 cellular networks. Dubbed Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A, it promises much faster download speeds over 4G LTE compared to the regular models, which the South Korean maker announced in early-September.

Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A is capable of offering download speeds of up to 450 Mbps. To put things into perspective, that is 50 percent faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805-equipped Galaxy Note 4 -- which is no slouch to begin with -- and a whopping 200 percent faster than the Exynos-powered model.

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The patent wars are cooling down. Rockstar Consortium's litigation against numerous Android handset manufacturers has come to an end after the group sold 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. The intellectual property risk mitigation company bought the patents for $900 million, ending lawsuits against HTC, LG and Samsung.

Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony formed Rockstar Consortium back in 2011 to purchase around 6,000 patents from the bankrupt Nortel Network Corp for $4.5 billion. 2,000 of the patents had previously been shared between the members of the consortium, and the remainder have now exchanged hands for less a quarter of the original sale price.

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Sources indicate that Samsung is lining up its own mobile payments service to launch next year.

ReCode reports that the South Korean firm is in discussions with a payments startup called LoopPay to develop a system that doesn’t require retailers to install any additional hardware.

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Curved displays look cool. There is no question about it. Frankly, anything that deviates from the norm in this space -- meaning, it is not flat -- tends to have a certain appeal to it. Is it a useful change? That depends. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that it has potential in certain scenarios, although there are some who believe that a curved display is nothing more than a gimmick. No matter where you stand on the matter, one thing is certain -- we will have to get used to them, as they are growing in numbers.

After first announcing TVs with curved displays, South Korean maker Samsung has started to offer desktop monitors with this feature, the latest of which is the 34-inch SE790C, rocking Ultra-WQHD resolution. In plan English, that means 3,440 by 1,440 pixels. Here is what else you should know about it.

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