After a year on the market, the Samsung Galaxy Mini is certainly due for a refresh.
That said, GSMArena seems to have received promotional materials and photos for the Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 from an anonymous tipster. It bares a resemblance to the Galaxy Ace in many ways, with that flat home button and silver bezel. → Read More
Mark one up for Samsung. After months of legal and PR battles, the South Korean company is finally able to sell and market their iPad clone in Germany. Just don’t call it an iPad clone anymore. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N (pictured left) is slightly different from the iPad — but that’s all that matters.
Samsung released the Galaxy Tab 10.1N late last year. This version features a silver boarder around the screen’s black bezel. The speakers were also relocated in a stereo configuration and now flank the screen. The original GalTab 10.1 was a blatant iPad ripoff. This version at least looks slightly different. → Read More
Thanks to our friends at Antengo, who absolutely love the TechCrunch readers, we have two huge prizes to give away this week: an Xbox Kinect and a Samsung Galaxy S II. There will be two winners for this giveaway and two ways to win for each prize.
You will have until February 12th, this coming Sunday, to win the Xbox Kinect and you will have until next Friday, February 17th to win the Samsung Galaxy S II. You can enter both giveaways. For all of the husbands/ wives, boyfriends/ girlfriends, and significant others out there, this is just in time for Valentine’s Day. → Read More
At CES, the AOL booth where we worked, did interviews, and ate lunch was just a few short feet from Samsung’s huge Galaxy Note booth, where they were giving out free shirts printed with your caricature, drawn, of course, on a Galaxy Note. There was a line around this thing the entire time we were there, scores of people waiting for hours for their free t-shirt.
Outside CES there were enormous banners in the most prominent and expensive ad spots on the convention center. Phone? Tablet? It’s Galaxy Note™!
And just yesterday, in a grandiose ad rather out of keeping with their well-received “next big thing” campaign, the Note was made out to be the end of all our troubles, ending the tyranny of using our fingers and letting us circle and cross out and all those things you wish you could do on your obviously-now-obsolete iPhone.
But I saw the Note at CES and formed my opinion in about five or six seconds: it’s weak. And that’s why this advertising blitz makes so much sense. → Read More
Do you believe in a thing called love?
If not, just listen to the rhythm of my heart… Or head on over to AT&T’s website to pre-order the Galaxy Note.
If for some reason you don’t remember, the Note is a 5.3-inch phone/tablet hybrid that showed its face in a costly Samsung commercial during last night’s Super Bowl. Its claim to fame would be a little stylus, what Samsung is calling the S-Pen, which makes the Note a tad more useful when you’re in a pinch and need to jot down a note or something quick like that.
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Samsung’s next flagship smartphone needs to be huge, iPhone 4 huge. It needs to be as competitive as the Galaxy S II as its set to go head-to-head with the iPhone 5. But success won’t be found as easily this time. Samsung had nearly a full year to design and release Galaxy S II after the iPhone 4′s release. The company doesn’t have that luxury this time around.
South Korean news outlet Electronic Times News just published a report that pegs the S3 as a superphone on a diet. The report states that printed circuit boards, chips and connectors allowed for an overall thickness (or thinness) of just 7mm. That’s 1.9mm thinner than the current Galaxy SII — not that several millimeters really mater. But even though the phone is thinner overall, Samsung is reportedly packing their next flagship to the gills. → Read More
It’s hard not to love the Galaxy Nexus, even if you’re not a Fandroid. With a 4.65-inch 720p display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and Android 4.0 ICS to boot, what’s not to love?
Well, if you’re being picky, perhaps you’re yearning for a white GalNex, in which case I have good and bad news. Which do you want first? → Read More
You can’t believe everything you read, nor can you trust everything you hear on TV. Especially if it sounds something like “four out of five people choose LG Cinema 3D over Sony and Samsung for overall 3D experience.”
Apparently the Better Business Bureau (more specifically the National Advertising Division) “has recommended that LG Electronics USA discontinue advertising claims made for the company’s Cinema 3D Television and 3D glasses.”
Back in June of 2011, LG sent out a press release claiming that four out of five customers prefer LG Cinema 3D television over Sony and Samsung in a number of different categories including brightness, color, picture quality, glasses, and overall 3D experience. The research was done by a company called Morpace Inc., which tested the TVs at their default settings without any branding shown. → Read More
Samsung isn’t the first company to break into the phablet space, but those of you waiting for a (more than) worthy successor to devices like the Dell Streak 5 won’t have much longer to wait. AT&T has just announced that their pocket-busting Galaxy Note will be hitting their sales channels on February 19, complete with a $300 price tag.
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Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat.
Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers. → Read More
We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a few extra smartphones and the holidays are over, so we’re back. What we’ve got for you today leans into more expensive turf, and unfortunately, our favorite Android devices for the past two months are also exclusively at Verizon, so Big Red subscribers should pay attention.
Without further ado, these are our favorite December/January releases of the Android persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the LG Spectrum, and the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx.
Enjoy! → Read More
According to the latest report from Strategy Analytics, Apple has now overtaken Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume. Apple achieved 23.9% market share during Q4 2011, narrowly beating out Samsung’s 23.5% share.
In addition, Apple shipped 37 million units in Q4, again going neck-and-neck with Samsung and its 36.5 million units shipped during the same time. → Read More
Every once in a while something comes along that’s worth a wait, and I think the Samsung Galaxy S III will be one of those things. We’ve all been expecting Samsung’s next flagship to show its face at MWC in February, but according to the Verge, Samsung may have other plans.
Anonymous sources who spoke with the Verge claim that the SGSIII will still be available “before summer,” but that Mobile World Congress in Barcelona may not be the most beneficial launch venue. → Read More
I just love it when leaks come straight from the horse’s mouth. A leaky horse mouth, if you will.
Electronista is reporting that a Samsung product marketing manager by the name of Ryan Bidan has let slip a few details on the next Galaxy Tab or, potentially, the next iteration of the Galaxy Note.
According to the report, Mr. Bidan hinted at the inclusion of an S pen (the same stylus used with the Note), 3D gestures courtesy of the front-facing camera, and perhaps even some voice controls “in certain circumstances.” → Read More
It’s not really news to say that the Galaxy S II is a hit, but it has actually become a mega hit in South Korea. According to maker Samsung, the Android handset has been sold a whopping 5 million times in its domestic market since release at the end of April 2011. In other words, a little more than 10% of the country’s entire population (48 million people) are now proud owners of the phone.
It’s the first cell phone that has reached this milestone in mobile-crazy South Korea, according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei. The paper also says that one out of four South Korean smartphones users owns a Galaxy S II (sounds like feature phones don’t play a big role in that country anymore). → Read More
The Surface has been around since 2007, but the new and improved SUR40 is a much more usable device. Microsoft and Samsung were showing off the new touch-capable table in NYC today, and I was lucky enough to get up close and personal with it.
The specs in and of themselves are impressive: 40-inch 50-point multitouch screen with a 1080×1920 resolution, AMD processors, 1GB of memory dedicated entirely to graphics, a 4-inch profile, and a host of USB/HDMI ports. It’s the computer you always wanted, save for the fact that it looks like a kitchen table and costs about $9,000.
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I’ve long wondered what exactly Samsung would do with their homegrown Bada operating system, and for a little while there the answer seemed clear — Samsung SVP Tae-jin Kang recently noted that Bada would be merged with the Intel-backed Tizen OS project.
In fact, he said at CES that the work to combine both platforms had already begun, which seemed like a pretty definitive conclusion for Bada.
Now it seems like Samsung may be having second thoughts about the whole process. Samsung representatives have reached out to AllThingsD and Information Week to say that a final decision regarding a merger hasn’t yet been made. → Read More
If you’re wondering why we didn’t stop by to test out the Samsung SUR40 touch-table, AKA the Surface 2.0, during CES, there’s a good reason: we did that last year. The device, while impressive, isn’t exactly new. But as it has little in the way of competition — the Surface is the nonpareil of touch tables — they probably didn’t feel they needed to get it out in any kind of hurry.
The device, which costs $8400 and ships this month, must be quite a bit more attractive than the original to companies eager to spruce up their public spaces. The old Surface was kind of a chunk, and the limited resolution was no help, either. Oh, and the price. The new Surface beats it handily in every respect. It’s flatter, lighter, wall-mountable, and 1080p. → Read More
For most of the ten years I’ve been coming to CES, every presentation, every booth, has had one goal: to create an ecosystem in order to encourage consumer lock in. Year after year, presentation after presentation, someone has come out to show how the phone will connect to the fridge which, in turn, will connect to the TV. And year after year, they failed.
Until now.
Samsung, and to some extent the other vendors, have finally cracked it. For most of the past few years they’ve watched as Apple ran circles around them in terms of media sharing and remote control. Obviously Apple’s systems have been limited to iPod/iTunes/iPad/Mac but Samsung, a major player in both the white goods and the mobile markets, can now have it all. → Read More
Here at the CES 2012 International conference, we promised you’d be seeing ultrabooks galore. Well, Samsung isn’t going to let you down, today announcing the Samsung Series 9 ultrabook. The Series 9 sports a 15-inch display on a compact 14-inch body.
This is the second generation of Samsung’s Series 9 notebooks, and the company calls it as thin as some of the original tablets we saw hit the market a couple years back. Yep, even when it’s closed. → Read More
