Samsung flogs 10 million Galaxy S IIIs in 7 weeks Samsung has sold more than 10 million of its flagship Galaxy S III phones worldwide in seven weeks, according to Shin Jong-kyun, the company's mobile tech top dog. The phone was first unveiled on 29 May in the UK, it runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich and it packs a 1280 x 720 PenTile OLED display and an ARM Cortex A9-based quad- …
"Not quite keeping up with the iPhone 4S".. Sure, but the SIII would have been bought by people who's actually looked at the spec and decided to buy it.
Not quite the same as the herd that are already saying they'll buy the unspec'ed unseen iphone5 when it comes out, just because it's got a picture of a fruit on the back.
Not quite the same as the herd that are already saying they'll buy the unspec'ed unseen iphone5 when it comes out, just because it's got a picture of a fruit on the back.
Damn. And I thought it might be because some of them were reaching the end of their iPhone 4 contracts, and being happy with IOS in general, would simply buy the latest version. This is not a behaviour limited to phone brands - many car buyers/leasers apply the same logic.
Written on Galaxy Note btw.
@ Anon OP, while I think you're a bit harsh, I do agree that the iPhone has now become The Default Option... the option which comes up when people think of "smartphone", and well done on them for getting there. 70-odd million iPhones sold in just 6 months is astounding, but a lot of that is because of it's image, peer-pressure (not pressure, but can't think of a better phrase), the fact that everyone seems to have one, so it must be good, etc.
I hate having to put my opinions into context by stating that I have a Galaxy S3, but there you go, I do, and I love it. Each to their own, the iPhone is pretty nice, even if I think most buy iPhones because of sheep mentality.
Very much a default offering, more than once I've been offered an iPhone,
so that is why its sold so many, because its pushed more...
Personally I usually laugh when they offer me an iPhone as an upgrade, since I use Android phones I consider iPhones less capable for my purpose
BUT the iPhone is an ok smart phone, I just wouldn't buy one..
Right now I own an S3, why? because it was the best Android phone on the market at the time of upgrade...
in 2 years, I don't know what I will use...
what's 70 million Android activations in 70 days (2 and a half months) then?
a lot of activations divided across a lot of different manufactures
And you feel that customer choice like this is bad in some way? A lot of activations divided accross a loot of buyer options helping maintain the freedom that Apple continuously tries to remove from us by continuously starting spurious IP cases.
If Apple had anything that even began to look like a monopoly any more, someone could take them to court for trying to abuse it.
At least in the UK they will now have to take out adverts admitting that their ideas have not been stolen. Perhaps other places could adopt this idea too...
The <Fail> is for Apples attempts at keeping people under their thumb. Not in a free market they won't.
Which no Android user actually cares about - just like no Widows user cares that ~233 million Windows licenses per year are spread over dozens of different PC manufacturers.
At the end of the day it's just a PC, or just a mobile device - what matters is the software, without which the hardware would be meaningless. And right now, far more people "care" about Android than iOS (about a million per day, or IOW double that of iOS, in fact).
This is why Apple fanboys are treated like cultists. They seem to care more about what benefits the Church of Apple than what benefits themselves. It's highly irrational, to put it mildly.
Anyway, I wish you good luck with your new iToy. You'll need it, if the disastrous 4S is anything to go by (still not fixed, BTW).
Indeed - never in the most heated Windows vs Linux/Mac/Amiga/whatever debates in the 90s did I hear a Windows fan go "But look how much money Bill Gates makes!"
The way the media now treat technology companies like sports, as if we care about which one is doing better, is odd. It's only Apple fans that have recently tried that tactic. The rest of us, even those of us who get fanatical about technology, care about the end products, and how things look and compare for the consumer. If Nokia make phones at lower profits than Apple, that's good for consumers - yet recently the media spun that story as negative press for Nokia and positive for Apple. If Android or Windows runs on loads of devices, that's good for consumers - we don't care that Apple's model makes more money for them. The only people who should care are Apple shareholders - and if those are journalists, that's a conflict of interest anyway.
If anyone thinks specifications other than those that can be perceived directly like screen size sell phones then they're living in a fantasy world. Customer satisfaction is the main factor, both by word of mouth and because salespeople understand that their commission is safer if they push a phone with a low return rate. Hence Samsung are rightly being rewarded for launching the latest in a pretty decent series of phones.
Clock rates, core counts, memory sizes, etc, mean basically nothing unless and until they actually become detrimental to the user experience.
For evidence of this from the other direction, see any of the postmortems on Windows Phone 7. No-one has ever said 'it would have succeeded except that customers are no longer willing to buy single core phones' and of the did they'd be laughed at.
To repurpose the old IBM saying, "Nobody ever got fired/divorced for buying an iPhone."
By way of comparison, I do know of a case where a colleague bought the latest state of the art (at the time) Android phone and it turned into a complete fiasco. Installing apps slowed it to useless (weird); and no OS upgrade made available. YMMV.
Disclaimer: we've got iPhones but are Android-curious.
iPhone's have planned obsolescence?
I had an iPhone 3G for two years, I had two major firmware updates in that time. iOS3 and iOS4.
So far with the 4 I've had iOS5 and iOS6 is due soon.
If that is planned obsolescence then what the hell are Android phones? DOA I think, you're lucky to get one major update.
Given that Android to iOS marketshare is about 5:3 (source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/02/comscore-may-2012-smartphone/), that's a cheerleading victory for Android amongst The Register's ranks. Apply your own prejudice to decide to what extent, if any, Android users skew towards the technical versus Android users being more vocal versus Apple users being more vocal but Android users really skewing very much indeed towards the technical.
You missed out the feeling of not being part of a group of people who feel that this is the way they can be seen as superior, creative and beautiful.
Apple won't help you. Using their goods in that way will indicate the opposite. My having an Android proves nothing either way and nobody claims otherwise. Many iPhone users are just wannabes.
The way I see it, the difference between Android phones and iPhones is thus:
If I buy an iPhone I am reliant solely on Apple to make a decent replacement at its end of life somewhere down the track. One stumble and I need to change my ecosystem in its entirety. If I buy an SIII, I get the best Android phone on the market at present but can feel slightly safer in that, manufacturer overlays aside, I have far more chance of its replacement (Android not just Samsung) being a market leader and/or something that hits the spot for me.
You're buying into an ecosystem of which your current phone is but one possible choice. I bought an iPhone because 4 years ago that was what was ahead in terms of usability. I am now looking at how Android phones have advanced and thinking "why not?". I'm still not a fan of shit like Kies and would much prefer it if Google would write some desktop syncing software like iTunes is (on Windows it's crap but on OSX it's fine) in order to support their product a little better. No, drag and drop doesn't pass muster as it's not syncing and mass storage mode only seems to work properly in Windows.
Any Android phone automatically syncs with Google's servers.
Admittedly I was surprised that my Google Nexus had no PC software whatsoever, having previously enjoyed the useful software that came with my earlier Nokia 5800. But still, I can see the reasoning - your average user is better off just syncing with Google as it works automatically and easily, and anyone competent enough to worry about connecting their phone to their PC is competent enough to either drag and drop, or use whatever 3rd party software they like. It supports the open standard of MTP, so any media software supporting that should surely work fine? (And if Itunes doesn't support the open standard that is MTP, I'd say that's Itunes that is at fault. There is other software that will do the job.)
That is part of the problem. I do not want to sync with Google's servers for reasons of both practicality and privacy. I have Gigs of music, photos, apps, and other bits on my phone. Syncing with the cloud is a non-starter. Backing up to the cloud is a non-starter. The only starter is my local machine. That's why I want the option.
I'm not sure why you mention iTunes and whether or not it supports MTP - it doesn't have to, it was written to support Apple devices. What I mentioned was that it would be good if Google, who wrote the OS, would write a syncing app for their OS rather than do their usual thing of part-finish jobs. If someone else cares to write one that offers as good a feature-set as iTunes at a minimum then that would be great but it doesn't seem to be the case hence we have shit like Kies. I even had issues syncing a Galaxy Tab on windows 7 with that crap.
Right, and not just for "a decent replacement" either, but for OS updates too, which Apple has a habit of arbitrarily cutting off when it wants you to give it more money (planned obsolescence).
Meanwhile, my two year-old SGS v1 is running ICS, regardless of what Samsung wants. You can only do that with Free Software like Android. That's the whole point of it.
Another thing to bear in mind is you can switch Android handsets as often as you want, between many different makes and models, and you get to keep your apps, just as you would with Windows or Linux if you switched PCs from one make and model to another. Whereas if you switch from Apple's closed ecosystem to anything else, you end up having to replace everything.
Between those crucial points, and the seemingly permanently dysfunctional state of Apple's "high quality" hardware, I find it astounding that anyone buys their products at all. There must be an awful lot of sheeple easily swayed by marketing propaganda out there.
Except there are plenty of high end Android phones (e.g., the S3), and plenty of cheaper Iphones (anything pre-4S - I've seen even the 3GS still on sale).
People buy Android (or Symbian, WP, BlackBerry etc) for many reasons - because they want that phone, because they believe it's better. That such platforms deliver the product that consumers want, at a lower cost than Apple, is an extra benefit on top of that.
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If your post was a reply to sabroni, then I think their post was sarcastic. I mean; the Reg site is just a website, and modern phones should all render it fine (The Galaxy note does fine). I have only ever had to use the mobile version, and that was on a desktop and because of a javascript bug in IE.
It was more of a reply to Chris N, as well as anyone reading the comments who may not be aware of the mobile site.
I agree that the regular site should be (and is) viewable on modern smartphones, but I happen to prefer the less cluttered look of the mobile website on my phone, and it also avoids having to do the zoom-n-scroll dance to read each story headline (my eyesight is not what it used to be, and my phone does not have a comically-oversized screen).
Indeed. There's some referenced sales figures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Historical_sales_figures - interesting to see how Android has left everything else, IOS included, behind in the dust. Also interesting to see how Symbian dominated before that, not Apple. Sad that the picture we've got from mainstream media reporting of the last 5 years has been so biased, and not at all representative of the actual true picture.
And still I see all these adverts for websites/services going only "Get this on your IPhone" - barely 20% of the market, outsold over 2 to 1 by Android, and with probably still a smaller installed userbase than Symbian.
I think the point is that Apple is more profitable per phone sold, and is more visible in the US market. Apple users tend to have a larger disposable income and so it is easier to flog them subscriptions. Android users are more careful. webOS users, all 8 of us in Europe, have to write their own applications and are likely to come asking for money. Blackberry users mostly have to have what IT allows.
Besides, as a recovering Guardian reader every time I see them trying to flog reading the G on an iPad, I feel ever so slightly smug.
Well everyone I know has got the III not one person has gone for the 4s since the Samsung release.....that includes Apple fans, Android nuts (Sorry I do not know anyone that has a Windows phone any more). Plus those that "want" a new phone are all looking at the III ..... iPhone 5...mmm....lets face it many people have had the apple iPhone fix and fancy a change.....some of course will stay with Apple....the churn is churning away from Apple a little.
I miss my Windows smart phone from years ago.....way ahead of its time....you could have apps on it years before Apple invented them.
I'm kind of a on his boat. I used iPhone a lot and my plan expires in November. But from what I've seen on Galaxy S, my secondary phone, the UI really is a mess, and the casing becomes terrible after a year, looks like crap really, worn out thin plastic. iPhone case still looks like "Bang and Olufsen" piece after 3 years of usage. I might switch over, but really after a good look at it.
1) see my post below, you're not comparing like for like numbers
2) you're saying that less than 52% of Apple's sales are for the latest model? Given its sold as a premium brand that's unlikely.
3) This was a model for model comparison, not how many phones Samsung sell in total. Many of what count for Samsung's total sales are cheap models like the Bada range.
1. You're comparing Apple's entire phone sales, to one single Samsung Android model.
2. I don't know, why don't we use actual facts rather than guessing?
3. As I explain in my other post, comparing sales of single models is a poor way to judge anything, and biased towards Apple. Not sure why being "cheap" is a problem - firstly, Apple's older phones also sell more cheaply. Secondly, if Samsung are able to deliver what customers want, at a lower cost than competitors, then that's something they should be praised for. Thirdly, even if you did compare only the expensive phones, it's not clear to me that Apple would outsell Samsung (since Samsung have other expensive phones, whilst Apple do not). Not sure why you dismiss the Bada smartphone OS either - that Samsung offer phones on a range of platforms demonstrates the diversity they have in their products. Bada alone sells at least as much as what IPhone did for its early years, yet the media barely mention Bada, whilst IPhone got nothing but hype from the start.
Numbers are not quite right...
Since the 35Million contains all iPhones, not just iPhone 4S, its fair to compare it to all Samsung Smart Phones, not just the SGS3.
I've seem many people owning new SGS2's over the past month, and a fair few Galaxy Note owners...
So count ALL smartphone sales from Samsung, and then ALL smart phone sales from Apple, then see who sells more...
I don't know, I just know Samsung make great phones and I prefer them to Apples offering,
screen size, speed, battery life, standard USB & interchangeable storage made iPhone a non-starter.
Samsung have a habit of quoting sell in numbers (how many have they sold to dealers and the network operators).
Apple quote sell out (punters taking them home and activating them).
The two numbers are hard to compare as you have no idea how many of samsung's phones are sat in a warehouse or on a shelf. For a worldwide release it can easily be a couple of million.
"Not quite keeping up with the iPhone 4S" is a completely biased comparison - Apple only have one phone per generation, where Samsung have loads.
The only useful stats are either comparing by platform (Android is way ahead of IPhone), or by company (where Apple are third behind Samsung and Nokia). Comparing by individual phone models is a useless stat, as it means that it's biased towards a company that has fewer models. *Worse*, it depends on how the models are labelled. Samsung and Nokia typically give different model names for small variations, whilst Apple don't. Why should a model have a different name just because it has a faster CPU, but not if it has more storage space, for example?
Any metric that can be changed simply by conducting a relabelling exercise is useless. If one ice cream company sells 100 cones, whilst another one sells 90 cones without flake, and 90 cones with flake, only a spin artist would suggest that the former is doing better!
I also note that this article doesn't say the IPhone 4S is selling better, it merely handpicks the statistic of selling X in so many days, which Apple always do better on (because the fanatics rush out and buy it immediately).
It's interesting to look at the history of Apple media coverage:
1. IPhone is number one (conveniently forget about Symbian, number one until 2011).
2. IPhone is outselling Android (conveniently forget about Symbian).
3. Okay, Android is outselling IPhone, but Apple are still the number one company (conveniently forget about Nokia)!
4. Okay, Samsung is way outselling Apple - but IPhone 4S is still selling more than Samsung Galaxy S3!!!
What will happen when the S3 is outselling the 4S (which is already happening in some markets, e.g., the top model in the UK for a year has been the S2 and now the S3)? My guess is the media will then switch to "Iphone 5 outsells Galaxy Note 2" - already the media are making the comparisons, since these two phones are expected to be released around similar times.
"making it the most popular smartphone series in the world"
Talking about a "series" is even more meaningless than models. Why do all of Apple's phones count as a single "series", but not all of Samsung's Android phones? The fact is that Samsung have been selling more smartphones than Apple (and that's before we get to the point that "smartphone" is ill-defined - why is the original Iphone, which couldn't even do apps, a smartphone, whilst many phones get labelled "feature" phones? This just means that 100% of Apple phones get compared to only a minority of Samsung's and Nokia's). It's kind of sad that stories about the immense success of Android and Samsung have to be blighted by this attempt to hand-pick stats to go on about Apple all the time, and make them look better (and I'm not just talking about this story - The Reg are one of the better places for fairly covering all the technology companies, the problem is more with the rest of the mainstream media).
It may be because I don't watch much commercial television but it seems to me that Samsung is only now really turning up the promotional knob as they have the exclusive deal with the Olympics and presumably wanted to ramp up quantity in advance. It was only in the last week that I noticed promos for the S III on Eurosport. I suspect we are all likely to be thoroughly sick of it in a month. Still, with the SIII, SII and the Galaxy Ace they have their segmentation right, just like Apple: premium, aspirational and make do.
herders the lot of you.moo.moo.
iphlop 4s barely makes it to "smartphone" level.
sammy stick usless bloody amoled eye burners in everything.
will stick with quad booting htc hd2.
one of a very small number of devices that can actualy be called smart.
yes it maybe a bit dated now,but still walks all over duo and quad corers and newer "uber" phones,
exactly what are all those cores doing in android,ahh,their trying to bulldoze android cos its so bloody nefficent and clunky that you need extra cores just to get buttah to rid of system lag! !! .
remeber,android is not real multicore capable,no phone is,so i will use old single corer til it dies of hardware fail,and have the reliability and free apps on winmo 6·5,android GB for reliable android,jellybean,because i can and fun n games,win phone 7.5 or 7.8 for the odd little trick and probably win 8 if/when i can be bothered too.
now you all run along and play with yer pretty candy while the grown ups do some work,theres good little kids.
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Every single time either Samsung or Apple are the subject of an article (and that's many, many times) we get the same flock of the same commentards saying the same thing, over and over again, (and, oh by the way, calling everybody else "sheep" or some derivative thereof) about the relative merits of two pieces of consumer bling.
In the real world, far fewer people give a sh!t.
Wow, 10 Million. I must be the only person that does not like the S3 then. I took it as an upgrade after reading so many pro-Android posts on the Reg, and after reading the spec thought it should be a decent phone. I had the choice between the 4S and the S3.
The damn thing is a mini-tablet! This barely qualifies as a phone - needing 2 hands to perform most operations it has been built with the design brief of a wet bar of soap in that it just wants to leave your hands as soon as you handle it. The smooth curved edges do nothing for the ergonomics of actually using it.
The O/S I am sure is capable if you're a techie willing to put up with "<insert app name> has stopped" over and over. In 3 weeks of ownership the S3 has "crashed" 14 times. By crashed, ending the task did nothing; only a reboot allowed me back in to Messaging (for example).
On top of that, why is it most of the apps want unconditional access to your call logs, network usage, contacts, calendar, GPS and first born children? Choose "No" to anything and you don't get the app. Sell your soul (or your contacts and phone stats in this case) with no guarantee of where this info ends up!
A couple of updates, and lots of calls to Samsung (who have been totally useless) and things are still no better. Hopefully a Jelly Bean upgrade in the future will rid it of the Samsung pre-load rubbish and make things a bit more stable.
I run a work Blackberry which performs better than this polished turd, albeit without the "smugphone" functionality.
"The damn thing is a mini-tablet! This barely qualifies as a phone - needing 2 hands to perform most operations it has been built with the design brief of a wet bar of soap in that it just wants to leave your hands as soon as you handle it."
Or, you have small hands. You know what they say about people with small hands... and I don't mean small gloves....
Did you buy it unseen and on spec only? And what size hands do you have? I've got small hands myself but I've seen the SIII and it's not too big to be held in one hand.
I have heard reports of the firmware being buggy. Unfortunately, this is not unusual for Samsung but they do normally get round to fixing it. But, you know what, if you don't like it, take it back or sell it to one of the many clamouring for one.
People people! Stop the bickering!
I'm certain that you can whine on about number of phones purchased and all that jazz but at the end of the day who really gives a toss? You aren't the ones holding the cash going "mwhahaahaha! Losers are buying another phone they don't really need and all these gadgets which seamlessly work like it's 2012 and we have standards!"
That person died unfortunately and we can all now move on.
Sheesh!
After almost three years of happy 3GS ownership. It looks like a lot of people have done the same as I see an awful lot of S3s. I did consider waiting for the iPhone 5 but the deal I got on the S3 leaves money in the bank in the event the 5 knocks my socks off.
There's not a great deal about iOS I'm missing at this point since Google have done a pretty good job of catching up with Apple in terms of overall usability. Actually, I do miss the App store and iTunes. Google play has some way to go in this respect.
But Phandroids are a bunch of arrogant twunts that have nothing better to do than bitch and moan about Apple because they are jealous that it gets more press time than their beloved blingphones.
I know people who have S3s and by and large they either haven't got a clue what to do with it other than twitter or facebook, or got it because it was the biggest baddest phone on the network at upgrade time, and inevitably earns the salesbod a big hefty wodge of commission
iphone owners on the other hand are generally better educated, know what they are buying and why they are buying into, and have more sense than to simply get the biggest thing with the most bling for the hell of it.
I mean, what actual use is a quad core processsor to make phone calls?
Does it allow you to use more batteries in one go than all the rest?
"iphone owners on the other hand are generally better educated, know what they are buying and why they are buying into, and have more sense than to simply get the biggest thing with the most bling for the hell of it."
Hahaha, purely anecdotal, but tell that to my 16 year old niece, who's just left school basically to find herself a rich footballer, and pestered her dad for the money to buy an iPhone because "all her mates have one". Or my old-school photographer neighbour, who admits to not knowing much about these things, but he uses a Mac on the desktop, so it's "probably best keeping it all Apple". Or the vast swathes of luddites at my office, both dullard males and giggley females, who's idea of technical knowledge involves knowing how to use an all-in-one remote at home, and they bought an iPhone because they saw Kim Kardashianwhatever on the front of Vogue with one.
But, purely anecdotal, of course.
" Everyone, for some reason, talks about whatever phone they have as if they're actually the guy who designed & built it. Maybe it's just me."
No it's not just you . It's the same with football ( We WON !! - no you didn't, you were just watching, they won !). Weird how spectators like to take credit for watching, buyers take credit for making. The Olympics will take it to a national level.
I'd probably have an S3 right now if I wasn't waiting for my next upgrade. Since that won't be until first quarter 2013, that means I'll have the choice between the ip5, sIII, or perhaps something even better. So goes the tech world. I have 0 brand loyalty. Whoever has the best tech, that's what I'll buy. Intel or AMD. Nvidia or ATI. iPhone or Android. It's all the same to me.
I buy a iPhone of whatever spec when the contract for it is north of 25 quid a month, yet a samsung phone is 13-15 quid a month.
It makes calls, takes pictures, sends texts, and surf t' internets , but what loony is going to buy a smartphone to watch a film on a 3.5" screen and crummy sound when they've got a 55" 3D tv with surroundsound at home?
Just what do you hope to gain by spending 45 quid a month on a phone?
This is just PR. Apple announces every 3 months how many iPhones etc have been delivered and sold, and gives a good indication of channel inventory. But Samsung doesn't, releasing PR statements from time to time clearly aimed at making themselves look like Apple.
What exactly does "sold" mean? When I first say "I've sold my house", I probably haven't even exchanged contracts. I'd like to see Samsung clarify their statement by saying (a) these numbers have been shipped and invoiced, and are non-returnable and (b) how many millions are sitting in the channel. At worst, it could simply be that Samsung have received firm orders for ten million. At best there were ten million in the hands of end-users after 7 weeks. Apple's numbers look slightly more like facts than Samsung's. At the very least, if Apple inflates the number, it comes off the following quarter's figure.
My next phone will probably be another iPhone (eventually) . I don't have a contract ,I get my phones off eBay and spend a tender a month on GiffGaff.
Why will my next phone probably be another iPhone? I rarely use the smartphone features now, but on the very rare occasions I don't have my fondleslab with me, haven most of the same apps on my phone helps with the withdrawal symptoms.....
Nothing wrong with the SIII but I already own lots of app store apps from when I first got my 3G and all the ones I've bought since. I have been fully asymilated and it would take something extraordinary to make me change now. But I said the same about Windows Smartphones - and then I saw the iPhone...
well that's nice to know Samsung keep it up least your prices and other makers lg Sony Motorola all drop in price on Amazon I can see the Samsung galaxy s 3 is slowly dropping but apples don't not unless they release a new model and want rid of the older ones. and why pay for a a apple anyway your just shown off to your friends ew look at me I have a apple woopie doo your just paying for the name half the time.
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