Samsung Goes First, Google Experiments And Apple Refines
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There’s a new rhythm to product releases among the biggest players in mobile tech, and increasingly, Samsung is building a reputation as the most brash and quick-to-act of what I would call the ruling triumvirate, which also includes Google and Apple. Google plays the reasoned experimenter, Apple hangs back and refines the best ideas to come out of the market, but Samsung increasingly seems willing to absorb the costs of diving headlong into new territory, just to prove it can.
Lead
In the first three sentences of Samsung’s press release on the Round, it uses “world’s first,” “mobile display innovator,” and “pioneering” in reference to the device, and specifically to its curved display and flexible Super AMOLED technology. Only deeper into the release do we get any sense of what the Round offers smartphone users that another phone in its lineup might now, but these seem to be mostly glommed on software tidbits, rather than anything revolutionary.
The Round isn’t Samsung’s first attempt to be a market pioneer. The Galaxy Gear smartwatch, while not the first smartwatch available, was certainly the most ambitious to date and the first one that arguably met up with the concept of a fully-formed wrist-wearable computer, too, with dedicated Android apps running right on it. And again, the emphasis here wasn’t on what this tech brought to a user, but on the fact that it existed at all; Samsung essentially took an advanced prototype, charged too much for it and released it to the public, which is exactly what it’s doing with the Galaxy Round.
Test
When Google introduces a “Beta” product, it’s doing the same thing companies have done for ages with their software and hardware products, but Google is arguably the first to do so on a massive scale, using its millions of customers as the beta testing group. You can view the current crop of Chromebook devices as A/B testing, look at evolutions of Nexus devices as limited market feature releases, and generally see their product lineup as a participatory lab that includes, potentially, nearly everyone on the planet with Internet access.
Refine
Likewise, Apple resisted the urge to jump in feet first on NFC, saw the tech develop through the trials and tribulations of Google the Experimenter, and eventually took the most valuable lessons and folded them into the iOS use of Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacons, which look at least initially to be far more generally relevant, useful and widely adoptable technologies than NFC ever was. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet, just the first tablet to get it right.
Of course, there’s merit in each of the roles: The First gets the ball rolling, and can provide a cautionary example; the Experimenter can manage R&D and user group testing on a scale unheard of before; and the Refiner stands ready to turn the most promising innovations into something people actually want to use, instead of something that just has the potential for usefulness.