Seoul-blackening disappointment for Samsung backers as stock droops Shares in Samsung Electronics fell to their lowest in four months, dropping over four per cent on Thursday, after analysts said the firm's quarterly earnings were likely to be hit by the strong won and weaker business in its display unit, according to Reuters. The Korean chaebol's stock closed down 4.6 per cent on its fifth …
LOL. I'd be interested to see if Apple outperform Samsung shares in the next 12 months - think they have a good chance to - especially when there are many very decent and much cheaper Android handsets. Samsung have managed to charge a premium as many people saw it as either a Galaxy S3 / S4 or an iPhone but now the iPhones have jumped forward technologically (fingerprint reader, 64bit A7 etc.) and Samsung now face a lot more serious competition from other Android makers. Add to that Samsungs mis-steps with region locking and their sWatch plus would be surprised if we did not see a larger screen iPhone this year.
Well I've made this point before - anything on smartphones these days can be seen as incremental changes - but a 'good' fingerprint reader dramatically improves security (by making it easier and more secure than a 4 digit PIN) and 64-bit processors may be overkill today but I'll bet you it will be the next 'must have' on flagship Motorola, Samsung et al phones in 6-18 months time. I'd also counter than a typical iPhone has a life of 3-5 years so getting it now just enforces that.
Turn that reader into a "colophone" (if you get what I mean) and thieves and access penetrants would need to steal not only an eye and a hand, but the colo-cation access apparatus (lower torso, for the less groovy-tubular-minded), AND hook it all up in a fashion that helps bypass security. Yes, it's unlikely to be a hacking method (hacking the parts to hack the device), but it would be a new, yet tactless and unclassy form security through abscurity.
Now, if Samsung could come up with a soul-partitioning appa- (or oppa?) rat-us device, Big Brother and overseeing Father could spy on the minds of mere mortals.
A true security breakthrough would be in teaching people to secrete their secrets via biofeedback so that passwords could be formed electrochemically (not just waves and endorphenes, but complex, cryptographically classed), meaning a stolen finger kept on ice (as in MI-5/Spooks, Season 6, Disc 1 or 2, IIRC) could not be used to bypass a finger reader. And, torturing would mean jumbling the passwords/bio-cyphers into uselessness.
Oh, wait, that would just reduce the covert intel ops to sniffing the EM spectrum, which might be just as effective but with less hassle of coercion and deck-stacking to keep doors open...
Anyway, this is just an opportunistic cyclical thing. In a couple of weeks, we could be seeing a revisionist version of this story, but instead, reading of how Sam sung its way to the bank due to booked orders from last year reapoing 54 trillion won of profit for 1Q14". This reminds me of how in the USA, half the papers report gloom and doom, and 12 hours later, its all roses, peaches, cream, and endorphine-solied bedsheets of joy on the very same doom article.
Grain of salt...
The point is people can easily see you entering your pin each time and it takes longer so people did not bother. If you use a fingerprint people do not have as much chance to see you entering a PIN so your device is more secure. Also the point is around half of people do not even set a PIN (probably because it's hassle / takes longer) but with a fingerprint it's quick so encourages people to easily be more secure.
Aren't "Apple" ARM CPUs manufactured by Samsung anyway? (They were in the past at least.) Yes, I'm sure that the company that makes most of the hardware in iphones and ipads, and produces their own cutting edge hardware, will be unable to make a 64-bit CPU when it's actually required. Devices with finger print readers aren't new.
"Add to that Samsungs mis-steps with region locking and their sWatch plus would be surprised if we did not see a larger screen iPhone this year."
The Galaxy Gear sold 800,000 in 2 months. Interestingly, that works out to be pretty much the same rate as 1 million in 76 days, a figure that for Apple was hailed as a runaway success.
A larger screen iphone would either annoy the people saying they don't like Android phones for being too large; or would have to be a separate model, thus further fragmenting the broken promise of "IOS is better, because there's only one, no two, no three models to develop for". Perhaps it'll be shipped with a free comfy chair.
Nor coverage (unless I missed it?) of this very recent Apple / iOS slam dunk - 29% of online orders were via mobile devices but of that 23% were iOS and just 4.6% were Android - also meaning everyone else was scraping around for the remaining ~1%.
So 5x more online orders via iOS and approx. 2x the value per order - so showing (despite apparently selling less volume of devices they are actually used far, far more) plus effectively 10x the revenue for retailers.
Of course it's not a perfect metric but like other studies of web usage it's a pretty universal one and this time the study was by IBM who I'd imagine have no reason for bias towards Apple - perhaps the opposite?
Who cares what device people use - so an Apple user orders something on his iphone or ipad, whilst I a Nexus owner prefer to use the laptop I already have, and suddenly that's a win for Apple? No, I still like my Nexus too, and use it for plenty of other things.
The real question is why only 29% of orders were done on tablets/phones, despite all this hype of how tablets will replace PCs. Perhaps this stat shows the answer - it's only Apple users who actually think that.
"(despite apparently selling less volume of devices they are actually used far, far more)"
I love how that when Apple do poorly at something, it's spun round to be a positive using the trick of "They score highly at A, despite being less at B". I might as well say, look how Android devices sell much better, despite not being used as much...
"Of course it's not a perfect metric but like other studies of web usage it's a pretty universal one"
It's a terrible metric. Ordering online something at Christmas is a tiny proportion of typical computer or phone usage, whilst web page access is reasonably a fairly big proportion of it. Even for web page usage, it is known to have problems (e.g., device identification).
Furthermore, no one actually ever gave a damn about which device was used more for the web, rather, it was a statistic used to infer what the sales were. If we actually now have better more direct evidence on the sales, if it turns out that IOS is used more for online ordering this xmas than Android, all that tells us is that online ordering at xmas is a terrible metric for judging sales. The fact that they're used more for online ordering at xmas is not a metric that anyone actually cares about.
(Maybe we should put the stats together, and infer that people were using ipads to order their new Android tablets...)
1)Yes, we're aware that it's a Chinese soup, but couldn't resist the pun. Homophonic puns are a great tradition that cuts across Sino-Korean lines, much like a lot of the overlapping cuisine. I would also suggest that puns in general are playful, not prescriptive.
2) Won ton vs wonton - as an Anglicisation of the variant Mandarin/Cantonese characters, each word reflects the vocalisation of a character... Most people who speak languages with different alphabets would agree here that there is no "correct" English spelling and that anything that aids proper pronunciation by Anglos (eg using a q instead of a k for the "Qaf/Kaf" in Arabic) is a good thing.
3) If you're going to school Reg subs' desk on substituting a proper Korean dumpling soup for the Chinese one used in the headline, you might like to go with mandu (or, if you prefer, mandoo) guk (aka "Korean won ton soup") rather than gomtang, which is oxtail/beef/bone-marrow soup - and which, I might add, does not necessarily contain dumplings. Indeed it is so rich they would be a detraction.
4) A pun using kimchee/kimchi… is beyond my powers at the moment. Thanks for the suggestion though, I will think on it. Perhaps after a nourishing bowl of something… I don't know about the rest of you but I find myself feeling rather hungry.
1) Fair enough, it just seemed a bit of a stretch to me, amusing but a stretch. Perhaps you could save it for an article on Huawei?
I couldn't come up with a pun on Kimchi either, or for that fact a better headline. The closest I could get was "Won up for Korea, shares down for Samsung" but your current effort is better than that.
To be honest my main reason for commenting was an excuse to throw in a reference to "One of our dinosaurs is missing", which is a great film.
Hey Reg Editors, I believe that "won ton" soup is CHINESE, not Korean, so it makes no sense for the Korean Sammy to be in hot won ton... instead, they would find themselves in hot gomtang... although I imagine that this sloppiness was in part due to the rather poor attempt to tie in hot won ton soup and the Korean currency, the "won"??
although I imagine that this sloppiness was in part due to the rather poor attempt to tie in hot won ton soup and the Korean currency, the "won"??
My guess is that they couldn't come up with a pun involving kimchi (or, like myself) didn't know that gomtang was a traditional Korean soup.
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