Okay, so how did Samsung end up ruling android phones?

[BladeVenom]

Things started to do south for Nokia before WinPhone.

Nokia was still growing in sales, and was still making huge profits before they announced Windows. Elop "Osbourned" Symbian, no one wanted Windows. He also killed of Meego, even though it was doing well.

They may have been losing market share, but the total number of smart phones they were selling was still growing, up until they announced Windows Phone.

 

[desura]

RE: Nokia's options...

Windows phone seems like the least bad choice for them IMO. Symbian was kind of a mess, wasn't it? And MeeGo would basically have been a lessor version of Android, since the two of them are Linux based.

Windows Phone was actually cheaper than Android I believe, when you account for subsidies given by MS to Nokia, and was a unique aesthetic.

 

[Joe1987]

Android is free.

 

[Graze]

Nokia was still growing in sales, and was still making huge profits before they announced Windows. Elop "Osbourned" Symbian, no one wanted Windows. He also killed of Meego, even though it was doing well.

They may have been losing market share, but the total number of smart phones they were selling was still growing, up until they announced Windows Phone.

hmm Symbian sold strongly. I think everyone knew that was a dead platform. Meego had real potential though.
My ex girlfriend had the N900 with Maemo but that things was nothing but a geek phone that lacked mainstream appeal.

 

[desura]

Android is free.

I believe that on average, Android manufacturers pay like $15 per device sold in patent fees. MS gets a substantial amount for its IP holdings.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/andr...ets-2-billion-year-android-patent-fees-really

 

[Graze]

I believe that on average, Android manufacturers pay like $15 per device sold in patent fees. MS gets a substantial amount for its IP holdings.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/andr...ets-2-billion-year-android-patent-fees-really

A license for winphone is tripple that and more though

 

[Roland00Address]

I also think Samsung has done great by getting their phones out to all the major carriers at the same time or close to it. This carrier exclusivity crap that HTC, Motorola, and LG are doing seems like complete self sabotage to me. I can't imagine what the carriers are paying for these exclusivities could be worth what they are probably lossing as a result of it.

If the phone manufacture doesn't listen to the carrier they may not carry the product, they may delay the product, and/or you won't get marketing dollars.

If you are a small company and you don't have much marketing dollars you are beholden to the carriers.

Samsung is large enough, and spends a lot on marketing they get to dictate terms instead of the other way around. Furthermore the greater the success Samsung has the more they get to dictate terms to the carriers (same thing with Iphone where the carriers actually pay to have the phone on their network instead of the other way around.)

----------

The original idea of the nexus line (I am talking about the first nexus, the nexus one) was not to make a cheap phone and improve the quality of the middle of the road phones. The original idea of the nexus one was to break the carrier stronghold, it was an unlocked phone that only required a gsm sim, and you got updates directly from google. The Nexus One phone was a phone you couldn't buy in a carrier store you could only buy directly from google. The nexus one being purchased only online was a complete flop and eventually google closed the online store and start distributing the phone through carriers. Of course even then it didn't sold well for why would the carriers want to push a phone that was designed to destory them and make them no money.

The nexus phones starting being popular with the galaxy nexus, and much more so with the nexus 4 for they had awesome specs and were undercutting the price of the high end phones. People started demanding these phones and they started buying them, not the carriers pushing the phone onto their customers.

Android is free.

No it isn't, it should be free but there are many royalties you have to pay due to patents unless you wanted to get sued by Microsoft or other companies.

 

[leper84]

IIRC didn't HTC screw up pretty badly updating their phones? Samsung hasn't been Nexus like but even the s3 is about to get a 4.3 update soon, and they've been pretty good about it in the past. That might factor in the mind of consumers who don't want to screw with rooting and custom roms.

 

[corkyg]

Apparently, a US Appeals Court has decided that Samsung has infringed on Apple iPhone patents. This, of course, is being appealed by Samsung - however, . . . it figures as a contributing factor towards Samsung success.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/apple-can-seek-to-block-samsung-smartphones-court-says.html

 

[Graze]

Apparently, a US Appeals Court has decided that Samsung has infringed on Apple iPhone patents. This, of course, is being appealed by Samsung - however, . . . it figures as a contributing factor towards Samsung success.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/apple-can-seek-to-block-samsung-smartphones-court-says.html

Oh please. Samsung would have been just as successful even if it didnt infringe.

 

[JAG87]

This is really easy to answer.

Because when Apple stunned everybody with the iPhone, Samsung was the first to respond with a competing device. HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, or god forbid RIM, had absolutely nothing worth even considering until a few years later. The latter was just way too late and got nuked.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Apparently, a US Appeals Court has decided that Samsung has infringed on Apple iPhone patents. This, of course, is being appealed by Samsung - however, . . . it figures as a contributing factor towards Samsung success.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/apple-can-seek-to-block-samsung-smartphones-court-says.html

To some extent, but I don't agree that's why Samsung is successful. A lot of the infringements are stuff like the "slide to unlock" and the rubberband visual effect for when you can't keep swiping over and other stuff that frankly I don't think should be patentable but work because of the large licensing deals that usually get made. And while Samsung did ape Apples overall look and feel, a lot of Apple's look and feel was anything but original so I didn't entirely feel that was right that they got to defend that like they did. Plus, in hindsight, its easy to see why Apple leveled off. They got stale if didn't outright have issues (bumpergate, Maps), slow to respond to consumer desire (display size), among other things. The problem is, they basically caught Samsung redhanded with internal memos saying they needed to basically ripoff Apple as their means of having success.

For a long time, only AT&T had the iPhone so that's one area where Apple screwed themselves. Also, it seems to be what Samsung offers that Apple and others don't, the MicroSD slots, the pen on the Note, the size of the display, the removable battery, that play a decent role in why Samsung is popular. Lately they've been pretty good about putting in about the best hardware, having some extra features, and then Android has gotten good enough that the smoothness advantage of iOS has been largely negated (in spite of Samsung slowing it with Touchwiz).

What it boils down to is, Samsung did a good job of iterating and then improving with each new one. They really didn't need to look too far for the recipe either, just look at Hyundai and Kia.

 

[corkyg]

Oh please. Samsung would have been just as successful even if it didnt infringe.

So, you are saying they did infringe, but would have grown without it? Apparently factual evidence for that contention is missing.

 

[desura]

To some extent, but I don't agree that's why Samsung is successful. A lot of the infringements are stuff like the "slide to unlock" and the rubberband visual effect for when you can't keep swiping over and other stuff that frankly I don't think should be patentable but work because of the large licensing deals that usually get made. And while Samsung did ape Apples overall look and feel, a lot of Apple's look and feel was anything but original so I didn't entirely feel that was right that they got to defend that like they did.

Have to disagree on that one.

I used Palm Pilots back in the day before these iphones came out. And I've played with Windows CE devices also, from before the iphone. None of them had the rubberband effect or the slide to unlock. When I first used them on an iPhone, it was pretty impressive as a tech feat, especially after having used those earlier devices, the iphone was incredibly fluid and smooth, amazingly so.

It was a rip-off, no doubt.

 

[desura]

A license for winphone is tripple that and more though

More than offset by the subsidies Nokia received from MS.

 

[blairharrington]

I can only speak to the American market. Samsung's rise is attributed to several factors already mentioned in this thread. Providing their own components gives them a lot of freedom to take risks with hardware. They were an established brand before releasing smartphones which goes a long way in terms of consumer trust and recognition. They consistently offer features that consumers want. (Removable battery, SD cards.) They do a great job of offering their devices across the 4 major carriers. Samsung's marketing helps a great deal but pointing to that as the only or main reason for their success is incorrect.

HTC had a really bad 2012 and maybe even worse 2013. The One X deserved to fail. (Crippled multitasking, 16 GB model only with no expansion, Sense 4 was ugly as sin.) The One is an improvement but I think it's still a very flawed device and poorly named. Get rid of the 'One' moniker. This isn't an HTC thread so I'll stop there.

Motorola, Sony, LG, and some other OEM's are making good moves going forward. Samsung may continue to eat up the profits in the near future but at least the competition is strong.

Also Nokia f'd up IMO by not embracing Android and going Windows Phone only. I love Nokia's hardware but I don't like that tile interface on a smartphone.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Mostly because HTC had two entire years of shitty phones that completely erased any goodwill towards their brand.

Sony joined the game late (and only recently have they started to lose their "evil" stigma). Motorola was way too tied to Verizon. LG had the Optimus 2X disaster.


Meanwhile, Samsung at least executed the GS1 and GS2 well. A variant would be available everywhere, you'd see advertising everywhere, the brand was coherent and the phones themselves were good.

In hindsight, I'm more shocked how badly the competitors dropped the ball.

 

[A5]

The short answer is that the Galaxy S/S2 was pretty good at a time when HTC and Motorola were putting out bad phones. They also spent way more money on marketing - the only people that were close was Verizon with the Droid stuff, but that didn't really help Motorola at all.

 

[s44]

In hindsight, I'm more shocked how badly the competitors dropped the ball.

Sony was weighed down by Ericsson, Moto by Verizon, and Nokia by... Nokia. HTC really did blow it, but because of their size they had little room for error anyway.

One thing people forget now is that the S and S2 years were when Qualcomm sucked... well, not fatally, but they were quite a ways behind on GPU and, by the end, Snapdragon was showing its age vs A9. HTC didn't have the option of designing its own SoC to compete with Hummingbird and Exynos.

 

[ChronoReverse]

I dunno, back then, OMAP was still a thing and Snapdragon was always "good enough".

The perceived problems (real and otherwise) were rarely performance anyway. For example, HTC had a bad reputation for battery life in the "terrible year" even though everyone else (except Apple) had only mediocre battery life. HTC somehow managed to be the worst significantly anyway. Shot themselves in the foot.

 

[WelshBloke]

IIRC didn't HTC screw up pretty badly updating their phones? Samsung hasn't been Nexus like but even the s3 is about to get a 4.3 update soon, and they've been pretty good about it in the past. That might factor in the mind of consumers who don't want to screw with rooting and custom roms.

S3 4.3 update was released here a little while ago. Its awful! Dont update to it, I cant stress that enough.

If you do update backup your EFS folder first as you wont be able to revert without it and youre going to want to revert I can guarantee that.

 

[Spineshank]

Marketing. They tried to make their feature phones look like an iPhone as much as possible. Touchwiz is the closest skin to looking like iOS. They have a home button. They took that, made them with good hardware, and a bigger screen.

 

[WelshBloke]

Marketing. They tried to make their feature phones look like an iPhone as much as possible. Touchwiz is the closest skin to looking like iOS. They have a home button. They took that, made them with good hardware, and a bigger screen.

Not having a physical home button is a fairly recent thing.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Not having a physical home button is a fairly recent thing.

Yeah, both my HTC Nexus One and HTC G2 had a physical home button (and I loved the trackball/pad function too). Meanwhile, my Nexus S doesn't have a physical home button.

 

[Commodus]

There's a few large factors at work.

1. Solid designs. Like it or not, Samsung simply managed some good hardware. It didn't really figure things out until the Galaxy S (which arguably was 'cheating' given its origins), but it hit its stride pretty quickly. Both the S series and other major phones have at least been good enough, if not great.

2. Copying Apple. Software patents are a murky area, but there's no mistake: Samsung purposefully imitated the iPhone's design for a couple of years. The Galaxy S is a cosmetic clone of the iPhone 3G/3GS, and both the S II as well as a number of follow-ups weren't that radically different. The software interface was tailored that way, too, and Samsung hasn't stopped copying on that front (S Voice is designed to mimic Siri, Wallet replicates Passbook).

3. Sheer financial clout. Samsung was already pretty big when it got into Android, and it has had little trouble throwing massive resources at both developing and marketing devices. Apple, LG and Sony could do that, but few others could manage it.

4. Designing and making its own parts. This ties into number 3, but it's worth breaking out -- Samsung can both invent and build its own CPUs, displays and memory. That means it not only gets the tech it wants whenever needed, but it isn't at the whim of outside suppliers. Apple has the advantage of designing parts, but it still needs someone to assemble them.

5. Missteps from rivals. HTC floundered around in 2011, and 2012/2013 haven't been much kinder despite a better strategy. BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm and others also made it easier, since they were still reeling from the blow dealt by Apple. And a lot of other mid-tier phone makers (Sony, LG and others) simply didn't have iconic designs that would sway the public at large.