Samsung: Sod off Apple, we've made gold mobile phones for way longer than you Samsung has launched a campaign to remind arch-rival Apple that it wasn't the first tech firm to release a golden bling-horror phone. The South Korean giant has gone to the effort of designing a special web page dedicated to showing off the garish champagne-coloured phones it has inflicted on the human population over the …
A very short time after the original iPod came out I offered my then-SO a relatively cheap MP3 player; not too sure about the brand, I suspect Sony. It was the size of a large-ish USB dongle, with a 1-line LCD and a simple but intuitive interface. It held just over 500MB of music, included a freakin' _radio tuner_ and was a 2-part job: a smallish USB drive that plugged into a larger body. You just detached the USB part and plugged it into any computer to add or remove media files, then plugged it back into the main "body" and there you went. It worked on a single AAA battery, which would power the thing for month (she used to fall asleep with it and only shut it down in the morning. Every single day.). It was friggin' AWESOME (her words). She got herself an iPod nano a few years later, she found it was the lamest thing ever. The controls were fiddly, it did not have radio, adding or removing files was an extremely painful process when it worked at all, andshe had to bring it back to the AppleStore 3 times because she thought the lousy battery life was due to her repeatedly getting a faulty unit before she realized it was "normal". She kept using her good old non-Apple music player until she recently got herself an iPod Touch, which she uses more like a toned-down iPhone (AppleTalk apparently _is_ good). She is what you could call a fangirl (she dipped her toes in the computer world on her father's Apple ][, later got the first-gen iMac, the first-gen MacBook which she still uses, a MackBook Pro, she got a MacBook Air as soon as the larger one was launched, etc...) and yet it still took Apple more than 10 years to release a MP3 player she would consider using over a cheapo USB-Stick-style one.
Think about it.
I had a pink RAZR as a backup phone back in the day when my main handset (possibly a Nokia 6550, I honestly can't remember as I never had to use it) and it lived in my kitchen drawer. I always had a backup phone somewhere, although oddly, not these days.
I'm not proud of that fact, but there it is.
For extra amazement, consider that the Samsung marketroid who provoked all this had the excuse that they were paid to write the original copy, which might have gone unnoticed, but (I presume that) none of the outraged responses earned a penny despite their obvious success in bringing it to a wider audience.
I am constantly amazed by the fans who have no clue and defend their brand.
These immature Fanbois are like a herd on the african plains. They have the same basic instinct - they want their own herd to be bigger and bigger, as they seek safety in numbers. It's because they perceive the fandroids to be like circling lions, an aggressor out to hurt them, and therefore they're scared of them. So they stay in their herd and shout at the "lions"
What they may not realise, is that these immature fandroids are like a herd on the african plains. They have the same basic instinct - they want their own herd to be bigger and bigger, as they seek safety in numbers. It's because they perceive the fanbois to be like circling lions, an aggressor out to hurt them, and therefore they're scared of them. So they stay in their herd and shout at the "lions"....
While WinPhone users are like the dung beetles who scuttle around underfoot, collecting up the crap that falls out of both herds, and rolling it into little balls in order to impress their mates.
Blackberries are probably like rhino herds. Small in number, endangered, and under threat by poachers (bad management).
"But there are certainly advantages to using it such as it being a highly efficient conductor and the fact that it doesn't suffer from corrosion."
It's the best heat conductor/diffuser around too. Apparently a solid gold frying pan is the best way to fry an egg.
(A National Geographic author tested one weighing about 3 pounds in the 1980s)
As for gold cased phones - not such a good idea if they obscure the antennas.
My favourite gold item has to be a mates leggy E23 (i think) 7-series.
He showed me a photo of it, and it was in a rather champagny shade of paint.
"Proper nice car. Six pot, auto, air con, Jewish Racing Gold".
I know the humour in that is a bit dark/non-PC/tasteless/etc, but that didn't stop me from near choking on my gobful of beer when he came out with it.
Steven R
Theoretically a pan with a solid diamond base would the best way to fry an egg. Apparently it is the best known conductor of heat... though of course impractical for most (all?) conducting applications.
[Edit: John Sager beat me to it, and deserves double points for giving figures]
"It's the best heat conductor/diffuser around too. Apparently a solid gold frying pan is the best way to fry an egg"
Copper is better (~400 W/m.K versus 318 W/m.K) and silver is even better than that (~430). However, for real egg-frying goodness, you need the ACME *Diamond* pan (>1000 W/m.K).
Google/Wikipedia is your/my friend here.
I had a few of the later Samsung slider phones (better than their Nokia equivalents at the time) from around 2006, then a couple of their touchscreen efforts (well featured, but some annoying design decisions)... I don't think they ever twice used the same connector for power, data transfer and audio headsets (!). The first one, a very thin slider phone, wasn't bad at all though.
I was surprised when I saw the Blackberry Curve 9320 and Samsung Ch@t 355 alongside each other.
I was even surprised when I saw the Dyson DC26 and Samsung VC21F50HDDR vacuum cleaners alongside each other.
Regardless of where your preferences lie, there are a large number of very similar design cues turning up, and it does make you think.
Just saying.
"Everyone can see Samsung lacks INNOVATION. Don't you have a brain of your own??? Goodness! You suck! I definitely am dumping my S4 straight to the toilet!"
Why buy an S4 if it lacks innovation? You want style (or at least media considered style) and innovation buy the iphone.
Samsung Smart TVs seem pretty innovative to me, although I haven't researched the history because I couldn't care less I either want one or I don't.
Pointless argument, buy the one that you like, if you regret it then so be it. Personally I prefer a device that I can upgrade so the iPhone is out for me, no cause to regret thus far, but if Apple come up with something so incredibly innovative and more importantly useful to me then I might. It's a risk you take when you commit to buy.
More important to me (and I would initially state that no corporates are spotlessly clean when put under a moral microscope) I personally like consumer choice rather than monopolies on anything. Iphone's near monopoly meant they could bully the carriers meaning it cost all of us more to buy an iPhone, the erosion of that position is a good thing regardless of the argument about who designed what. Apple, like all corporates, want to protect market share and felt the best way to do so was lawsuits, undermines the innovation argument IMO, but as above I don't care less, I want it or I don't.
Apple were at one time hip for not being Microsoft, Microsoft being the big corporate bully, proving that Leopards can indeed change their spots. A shame really.
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