Behold Samsung’s new commercial for the Galaxy S II:
It’s a pretty clever ad–certainly more so than most that make fun of Apple, and even if its claims about 4G are questionable–and if it ticks off iPhone owners, that’s apparently OK. In an interview with Steve Kovach of the Business Insider, Samsung marketing honcho Brian Wallace says that the company isn’t actually trying to convince iPhone owners to switch to Galaxy phones. It’s addressing users of other Android handsets, and using Apple fans as a target of satire.
Side note: All ads that mock Apple do so based on the notion that the company’s customers are style-obsessed young people. I’ve come to think of this as the Unicorn Tears theory. And I don’t think it bears much resemblance to the reality of Apple’s user base.
I’ve stood in lines to buy new Apple products. I’ve waited at the Apple Store to talk to a Genius. I’ve done a lot of observing of Apple customers, and while it’s possible that the company’s customers include more style-obsessed young people than average, I don’t think such folks dominate. Mostly, the Apple customers I’ve seen look like America. They’re young, old, hip, square, smart, clueless, pretty, ugly, admirable, alarming, and–like people in general–what former New York City Mayor David Dinkins used to call a gorgeous tapestry…
Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone
iPhone 4S Camera vs. “Real” Cameras
Chris Foresman of Ars Technica conducted an ambitious comparison of the iPhone 4S camera vs. an Olympus point-and-shoot and a Canon DSLR (as well as Samsung’s Galaxy S II phone). The results weren’t conclusive: Foresman says that the best camera is the one you have with you, which was always true and always will be true. But the story’s worth reading and the image samples show just how far camera phones have come.
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Yipit’s New App: Nearly Every Deal, on Your iPhone
Yipit co-founder Jim Moran is a self-confessed “deal maniac.”
And that’s a good thing because he and his team have come up with a new offering for other deal chasers: The Yipit iPhone app, which went live this week in the App Store.
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Still More on Mobile Flash
If you’re not sick of thinking about the end of Flash on mobile devices already, people are still writing stuff about it that’s worth reading:
Adobe’s Mike Chambers gives several reasons for mobile Flash’s death, but the first he mentions is Apple’s rejection of it:
This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.
And Mobile Opportunity’s Michael Mace–thoughtful as always–says that greed did Flash in:
So here’s what Adobe did to itself: By mismanaging the move to full mobile browsing, it demonstrated that customers were willing to live with a mobile browser that could not display Flash. Then, by declaring its intent to take over the mobile platform world, Adobe alarmed the other platform companies, especially Apple. This gave them both the opportunity and the incentive to crush mobile Flash.
I agree that there were a bunch of reasons why mobile Flash never amounted to anything, but I still think one of them trumps all others: It didn’t work. If it had been fabulous, even Apple might have had to reconsider the situation.
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The UK’s Siri Speaks Out
Wait, in the United Kingdom, Siri is a guy?
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Siri is Sick
Tweets and blog posts are reporting that Siri–the iPhone 4s’s coolest feature–isn’t working, at least for some folks. (When I try it right now, she’s telling me she can’t connect to the network.)
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GarageBand Comes to the iPhone
When Apple brought its OS X music app GarageBand to the iPad earlier this year, it was a convincing counter-argument–one of many–to the increasingly tired theory that the iPad is only good for consuming stuff, not creating it. Now it’s taken that iOS version of the app and made it work on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), too. (It’s one universal $4.99 app for all three devices.)
On the iPhone, GarageBand is a nicely shrunken-down version of its iPad self, with virtual pianos, organs, drums, guitars, and the ability to record and play with samples and plug in a guitar. You can record music and transfer it to the OS X version of GarageBand (which is part of iLife) for further work.
I don’t even qualify as an amateur musician, but GarageBand is fun to play with, and the general level of polish and ambition is exceptionally impressive. I’ll be fascinated to see what people who know what they’re doing do with it. Images after the jump.
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Is the iPhone 4S a Battery Hog?
TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld is unhappy with his new iPhone 4S:
Today, my iPhone died after about 8 hours—not even enough to get me through a full day without recharging (and this is typical). This was not 8 hours of constant use (unless you count the constant pinging of notifications, which may be the culprit). It was 8 hours total from the time I unplugged it in the morning and took it with me until the screen went black at around 4 PM. According to the specs, the iPhone 4S is supposed to get 200 hours of standby time, 8 hours of talk time, and “up to 6 hours” of Internet use on 3g. During the day, I made half a dozen calls less than 5 minutes each, used the Internet for an hour on the train (email, Twitter, light Web browsing), and then maybe another 90 minutes throughout the day.
Schonfeld isn’t the only person I’ve seen grumbling about this issue. Macworld’s Chris Breen has covered it, and provided some troubleshooting advice. And the Guardian’s Charles Arthur says that Apple is on the case.
How much battery life you get out of a phone is heavily dependent on how you use the phone and what you use it for–and I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as a typical user of the iPhone 4S or any other smartphone. But in my time with the iPhone 4S so far, I haven’t noticed any striking difference in battery life compared to the iPhone 4. With both phones, I can almost always get through one day, and a bit more, on one charge.
If you have an iPhone 4S and upgraded from an earlier iPhone model, have you detected a difference?
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Android Updates: Assume Nothing
Over at The Understatement, a revealing info graphic about Android phones (and iPhones) and the situation with software updates. Overall, it’s ugly for Android owners…
The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers.
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C Spire Wireless to Launch iPhone 4S
Remember when the iPhone 4 was only available on iPhone in the U.S.? Now it’s coming to a carrier I’ve never even heard about.