In Case Anyone Cares, Here Are A Bunch Of Early Samsung Slider Concept Designs

Samsung and Apple are currently fighting over rectangles and retail packaging. The legal battle is a classic CF, but the process has yielded a treasure trove of early Apple product designs. So far court documents have revealed early iPhone and iPad designs. Some models have kickstands, others are inspired by Sony — all pretty interesting. But today is Samsung’s turn with freshly-minted court documents revealing some early feature phone concept designs. And you know what? Samsung’s early designs are lame.

Once a staple of Samsung’s mobile portfolio, these sorts of fashion-forward feature phones attempted to bridge huge gap between more basic devices and the smartphones of the day.

The designs displayed here are all sliders, and there are three main categories to pore over — there are variations of the 2.5-inch Skin Slide, 2.7-inch Slide, and 2.9-inch Q Slide concepts. Again, nothing super-exciting, but it’s always sort of cool to see what exactly goes into creating a device mean to stick with users for years. It’s worth noting that there are a few familiar faces to be found — the “Q bowl” design looks nearly identical to what the company would eventually call the “Glyde,” a piss-poor QWERTY slider that wound up on Verizon’s shelves back in 2008.

Meanwhile, the Apple/Samsung battle will continue to rage on for weeks to come. The two companies are at odds over trivial, but still substantial (and usually patented) details. For now though, feel free to indulge in a blast from Samsung’s not-too-distant past.

Five Smartphones That Are Ideal for Students

      Students generally need a powerful phone, as it will be their major way of communicating with friends and family, whether it's by text, IM, or social networking. Plus, a smartphone can be an invaluable tool for keeping up with a hectic schedule, or blowing off steam with a game or two. And they might even use it to call someone at some point.

#1: Samsung Galaxy S III

The Samsung Galaxy S III comes close to being a laptop that you can fit in your pocket. Despite its sleek design, it offers a generous 4.8-inch high-res display. Thanks to Android 4.0 and a powerful 1.5 GHz, dual-core processor, 4G connectivity, an 8MP camera, and S Voice commands (Samsung's answer to Siri) it is one powerhouse of an phone.

The Galaxy S III is offered by every major wireless carrier in the United States, making it the most broadly available smartphone in this country. And a version with a quad-core processor is widely available in other countries around the world.

Read the Samsung Galaxy S III Review

#2: Apple iPhone 4S

The flagship phone from Apple has sold by the million, to the point where it and its predecessors have become cultural icons. This device has a 3.5-inch Retina touchscreen, 1GHz dual-core processor, 5MP camera, and 3G,but Apple's smartphones have never been about cutting-edge specs. Instead, they emphasize ease of use, simplicity, and an almost astounding number of apps.

While the iPhone 4S is still popular more than 9 months after its launch, a replacment is expected in early fall -- those who can afford to wait might want to do so.

This model can be fround at AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Read the Apple iPhone 4S Review

#3: HTC One X (U.S. Version)

HTC released the One X, its new flagship Android smartphone, earlier this year to rave reviews thanks to its excellent camera, beautiful 4.7-inch display, and a powerful 1.5 GHz, dual-core processor running the show. Other features include Beats Audio, HTC's Sense 4 overlay, and 4G LTE connectivity, though it is worth noting that, like the Galaxy S III, the international version of the phone does not have LTE, instead swapping out that feature for a more powerful quad-core processor.

While our reviewer gave it a slightly higher score than the Galaxy S III, the Samsung model comes out slightly ahead because it is much more widely available -- at this point the One X is only offered by AT&T.

Read the HTC One X Review

#4: Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX

The Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX was released a matter of months after the initial release of the Droid RAZR, coming on the heels of complaints regarding the original model's battery life. Motorola more than adequately addressed the problem, releasing a phone that is marginally thicker than its predecessor, but also packing a 3300 mAh battery that provides many more hours of battery life. Combined with high-end specs like a Super AMOLED display and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, the Droid RAZR MAXX took a good phone and made it great.

This device is a Verizon exclusive.

Read the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX Review

#5: Samsung Galaxy Note

The Samsung Galaxy Note is something of a polarizing device in that some people may take issue with its size, while others may laud its roomy, 5.3 inch Super AMOLED display that allows for the usage of Samsung's S Pen stylus. The device spawned the term "phablet," as it's big enough to be considered a smartphone/tablet hybrid, but the it also has more going for it than its massive size. 4G LTE connectivity and a powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core processor are some of the Galaxy Note's "noteworthy" features, so if size isn't an issue for you, this is definitely worth a look.

It is offered by AT&T now, and will coming to T-Mobile soon.

Read the Samsung Galaxy Note Review

#6 HTC One S

A more affordable version of the HTC One X, the One S is more modestly specced, with a slightly slower dual-core processor? and a smaller, lower resolution (4.3-inch, 540 x 960) display. Nevertheless, the processor of the One S, a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260A Snapdragon with two Krait cores running at 1.5 GHz, performs admirably, to the point where it's almost indistinguishable from that of the One X. Also appealing is its sexy, slim build, measuring only 7.8 mm thick, making the One S a cheaper yet almost equally attractive offer as its big brother.

Currently, this handset is available only from T-Mobile.

Read the HTC One S Review

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 App Marketing Costs On The Rise

Samsung Galaxy Note Slated to Hit T-Mobile Stores Aug. 8

Earlier this month it was announced that the Samsung Galaxy Note is officially heading to T-Mobile. Well, it seems a date that consumers can expect the super-size smartphone to debut has been named: August 8.

[click to view image]The tablet phone, which launched from AT&T earlier this year, offers an impressive 5.3-inch display, Android 4.0, and 4G HSPA+.

Exactly what the Galaxy Note will cost depends on which plan shoppers choose. Those who go with T-Mobile's Equipment Installment Plan (EIP) can get it for $200 with a two-year voice and data plan plus 20 monthly payments of $20 each. Classic voice is also available for customers, and the device will cost $250 after a $50 mail-in-rebate card with a two-year service agreement.

More Galaxy Note Hardware Details

The large 5.8 x 3.3 x .4-inch device comes in at 6.3 ounces. The 2100 mAh Li-Ion battery offers 10 hours of talk time and 16.67 days of standby time. This powerful tabletphone comes with 1GB of RAM running on a 1.5 GHZ Dual-core processor with 16GB of built-in memory. For those looking for more space, a microSD memory card can add up to a total of 48GB of storage.

A Low-Cost Option

T-Mobile also announced that the Samsung T159 handset will also be available on August 8. Perfect for cost-conscious minimalists the handset is going to offer all the basics including: text and picture messaging, a 1.3 megapixel camera and Bluetooth connectivity.

The T159 will be 3G capable and run on its own proprietary OS. The small 3.8 in. x1.9 in. x 0.6-inch device is going to be a light 2.6 ounces. The 800mAh Li-Ion battery will offer 4 hours of talk time and 8.3 days of standby time.


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 Samsung and Apple Dominate

W3i: App Marketing Costs On The Rise, Jump 56% On iOS, 70% On Android Since January

It’s no secret that the mobile app landscape has become extremely competitive. Over the last few years, this has led to an incredible amount of innovation and progress, but the cost of visibility — of acquiring new users — is also on the rise. In fact, Fiksu found that the cost of acquiring users hit a record high in December. While December is a critical month for app discovery, it remained to be seen whether or not this trend would continue.

Today, W3i, the monetization and distribution network for app developers, released new user acquisition figures for the first half of 2012, and the results tell the same story and are worrying for developers. Assessing hundreds of millions of mobile users from January to June 2012, W3i found that the average cost-per-install (of CPI) of mobile apps increased by 70 percent on Android and by 56 percent on iOS.

By June, the cost-per-install on Android had risen from $0.30 to $0.51, while iOS CPI has increased from $0.59 to $0.92.

W3i attributed this increase, in part, to mobile gaming giants like DeNA have entered the U.S. market, a prime example of the fact that, for the first time, billion-dollar companies are now competing with small to mid-sized developers. As free-to-play giants leverage their huge marketing budgets to help attract new users, the overall cost of user acquisition has increased — making it increasingly difficult for developers who are trying to make a living in apps.

“The entire user acquisition market is undergoing a sea change that will require mobile developers to re-think how they obtain and monetize their users,” said Robert Weber, co-founder of W3i. “This could be the ‘innovate or die’ moment for a lot of developers as the competition for mobile users continues to heat up.”

Many were surprised when popular Mac and iOS email client Sparrow recently exited to Google. Considering that the Sparrow team was widely respected, the app had risen to popularity, and the team had raised a seed round from some notable investors, it seemed a somewhat disappointing result.

The team behind iOS development startup, AppCubby, recently penned a post talking about what it called “The Sparrow problem” and the challenges facing indie mobile developers.

Here’s an excerpt:

    … Things have definitely changed and Sparrow is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect. Sure, independent developers may scrap it out one app at a time, and some may even do quite well and be the exception to the rule, but I don’t think Sparrow would have sold-out if the team — and their investors — believed they could build a substantially profitable company on their own. The gold rush is well and truly over.

AppCubby’s conclusion, mixed with this news from W3i, points to the hard truth that, going forward, developers will likely have to consider new alternatives to marketing. W3i recommends that developers focus on designing apps for strong monetization to optimize their ability to compete, along with making paid buys during focused time windos to magnify chart rankings. And, since cost rises with volume in this market, there’s still hope for beating the average rates by producing titles in less-saturated areas.

Meanwhile, W3i said that, for the most part, social app discovery is still an unproven method for developers, with Facebook’s App Center still new to the market and Apple’s App Store becoming increasingly competitive. But social mechanics will become increasingly important going forward.

Iris Shoor also recently penned a post for TechCrunch talking about the approach she and her team took to marketing their app, and how they used non-traditional marketing tactics to get to 10 million downloads, including getting customer stories and testimonials and creating direct channels to their users.

W31 also noted that, like we saw from Fiksu’s analysis in December, the value of new users jumps even more during long weekends. Unsurprisingly, the company found that holiday weekends are high in advertiser demand, with rates increasing by 65 percent over the 2012 Memorial Day Weekend, for example, with some CPI rates even more than quadrupling the industry standard.


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 Apple Vs. Samsung

The First Company To Build Your Identity Into Your Phone Wins The Next Decade

Editor’s note: Rebekah Cox is a product designer at Quora and previously a product design lead at Facebook. This post is a followup to a recent tweet, and first appeared on Quora.

It’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature.

So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention. Those areas where your attention is focused assemble to form a set of experiences that shape and influence where you’ll direct future attention. But that attention is interrupted all the time by people, events, things, desires, boredom, weather, etc. and that process of interruption is, largely, contained to physical space because that is a natural gate on access.

Then there’s the phone. The “phone” part of the mobile phone is important not because of the voice communication it enables, but rather from the habit and etiquette that the ringing bell created in society and the direct access it grants to the caller. It’s the promise of instant communication at the cost of having attention interrupted and redirected. The key to unlocking that attention is a semi-random sequence of digits which you can give to someone else to indicate that the person now has permission to interrupt you and to access your attention directly.

Email works so well because it is another opportunity for access and people have formed a collective habit of actively directing attention toward their inboxes at regular intervals. We have all agreed to walk to our computers and check the new mail indicator and are generally addressable through a combination of a username and domain. It’s not as insistent as the phone, though, and provides just enough lag to enable some measure of control over granting access. Twitter and Facebook have feeds which abstract away both the To: and Subject: fields of email and represent two very different networks but are nonetheless an evolution of the habits email created. Facebook further improves the method of connection through friendship and the use of real names with the network itself providing necessary disambiguation.

Currently all these disparate forms of communication are competing[1] and in terms of mobile, specifically, have been fashioned into apps that exist without hierarchy on top of an identity agnostic framework. Identity is largely misappropriated or at most a small component of some percentage of those apps[2]. Then there are the notification systems which allow us to manage certain types of incoming information, but the experience is still essentially a channel for the applications’ own interests: ignoring, instead of reinforcing, the user’s identity.

It cannot be ignored, however, that there are benefits to that competition[3]. With several different communication channels, it’s easier to prioritize who gets direct access (texting, calling), who gets secondary access (email) and who gets excess access (feeds). Another issue is how quickly these systems become overwhelming and how easy it is for well intentioned users to dig themselves into an experience hole. But these are tractable problems when the design principles are focused around identity and the system is explicitly responsible for maintaining all material facts about its owner[4].

A mobile experience that truly represents your identity — in a way that both resembles and enhances an in-person conversation but still affords you control over how you portion out your attention and provides context — could tie the knot for the myriad communication channels available.

    R. Marie Cox @artypapers

    The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.
    30 Jan 11

    
[Image via typedvorak.com.]

________

[1] The Facebook Messages product is arguably the first step in the first large scale attempt to consolidate all these communication channels and create a central stream for directed information. Your Facebook profile is also arguably the best representation of your public identity and how you want the world to view you in context of your peers. Those are two huge parts to executing on mobile identity and why rumors about a Facebook phone are so ripe. It’s also possibly why the Messages product currently feels so awkward — because it remains as an incomplete thought until the later stages of the product materialize. This is all speculation on my part, however; I have no inside information about a Facebook phone.

[2] Address Book, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all serve to fracture your identity. Android has an excessively aggressive address book that attempts to manage your social connections but provides no true representation of a person’s identity within the system.

[3] If it were up to the carriers, we’d have identities composed of NASCAR ads and group buying coupons that require an extra monthly fee to connect to more than 10 people.

[4] Imagine priority calls, texts, inbox, feed, etc. And those are just the naive solutions, better ones are out there.


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 Behold, Early iPhone and iPad Prototypes

Apple Vs. Samsung: Case Overview for the Patent Trial of the Century

Over the course of the last few years, Apple has unleashed a slew of intellectual-property lawsuits against Android device manufacturers such as: HTC, Motorola and of course, the poster child of this continued litigation, Samsung. While IP lawsuits are nothing new in the world of technology manufacturers, it has become glaringly apparent after the ban of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany (back in September 2011) that this case could hold serious repercussions for both parties and consumers alike.

[click to view image]Since then, the two mobile giants have been preparing for their trial case which is scheduled for Monday, July 30. With no love lost between the two parties and the astronomical stakes at hand, this case has all the makings of a landmark trial.

The Complaint           

The case began over a year ago with Apple issuing an official complaint on April 15, 2011, stating:

"Instead of pursuing independent product development, Samsung has chosen to slavishly copy Apple's innovative technology, distinctive user interfaces, and elegant and distinctive product and packaging design, in violation of Apple's valuable intellectual property rights."

The interesting thing about the complaint brought forth by Apple is its wording. Apple takes as much issue with Samsung lifting design elements from their brand, as they do with the core design of its operating system Android. Notably this greatly increases the significance of this case, potentially making this case as much about Google as it is about Samsung.

Trade Dress Infringement

Apple introduces a number of trade dress infringement claims under 15 U.S.C. -- 1125 and 15 U.S.C. -- 1114. Trade dress is a form of intellectual property that basically refers to the visual aesthetics of a product or packaging (including design elements) that signify the source of the product with consumers. Basically meaning any iconic visuals that spur brand recognition with the consumer, such as Apple's use of the prefix 'i' in their products (i.e. iPhone, iPod). Namely this law is in place to protect the consumer from being confused into thinking that a product has affiliation with another brand or company.

If you take a look at the case (which can be found here) it's apparent that some of these individual claims are outlandish. For example, it's unlikely that Apple will try to sue everyone who uses a tray that cradles their product so that it's visible when opening the packaging. However, the important thing to understand is that the court will be looking at these claims collectively; deciding if the overall appearances of Samsung's products (hardware, software, and packaging) are intended to create a connection between Apple products.

Additionally it's worthwhile to note that Apple has a stronger claim with their second and third trade dress claims than their first, due to the fact that they have already established patents for the elements that are addressed in the claims. This means that Apple has already convinced the US Patent and Trademark office that these elements are distinctive and protectable. Again, it all comes back to whether or not the design of Samsung's products could confuse the 'average' consumer into thinking that they are Apple products.

Infringement of design patents

In addition to the three prior trade dress claims, Apple also makes a number of design patent claims that act somewhat similar to the previous claims made. The major difference between the trade dress claims and patent claims is how they are legitimized, but regardless, both claims ultimately raise the same question: is the protected device similar enough to the product in question that it could potentially trick the consumer into thinking that there is a connection between the two?

This question (while grossly oversimplified) is what the majority of the case will revolve around, especially the portions that specifically target Samsung's designs.

Additional Patent Claims

While the majority of the case revolves around Samsung's designs, Apple has issued a number of claims that deal with more technical claims revolving around Android-related content. Most of these claims are related to small technical applications, but the major claim of course is the one concerning patent #8,086,604: "the universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system" (a.k.a. their universal search function).

Damages

On July 24, Apple released information that outlined the proposed damages of Samsung's alleged patent infringement at $2.5 billion. This would cover what Apple estimates are $500 million in lost profits, about $2 million form Samsung's "unjust enrichment", and $25 million for other "reasonable royalty damages". These damages are also apt to grow if Samsung is found to have willfully infringed the patents, and Apple argues that Samsung "chose to compete by copying Apple".

If Samsung is found guilty of infringing patents, one of two things could happen. Either Samsung would be forced to stop selling the products that use the infringing elements or Samsung would have to license these patents from Apple. If the latter is the case, Apple is asking anywhere from $2.02 per unit of "over scroll bounce" techniques to $24 for more in-depth patents.

There is also a great deal of risk involved for Apple as well. If Samsung is to win its counterclaim it could potentially cost Apple billions of dollars in licensing fees and force them to remove products off their shelves. While this is unlikely, it certainly is not out of the realm of possibility.

At this point it seems rather unlikely that the two parties will be able to reach a form of settlement; meaning that the 10 jurors (most of whom likely have little to no prior understanding of software design and the patent system) will have the power not only to determine liability, but to put a dollar figure on the amount.

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Galaxy S III