Samsung: what did we do to deserve this!?

[Puddle Jumper]

Uh... no.

I think it's more proper to say in terms of sales, Samsung holds the lead over other OEMs for this generation.

But part of that success, as said, is attributed to learning and leaning on other OEMs' failures from early versions of Android. And the other is attributed to "stealing" technology from Apple. The first Galaxy S lineup clearly stole Apple's A4 CPU core.

Seriously? Hummingbird was developed by Samsung and Intrinsity (who Apple later acquired) and Appe used that same CPU core in A4. It's also worth mentioning that Hummingbird had double the GPU performance of A4.

The Galaxy S didn't build upon the Evo either, they were released fairly close together and the Galaxy S out sold it by a significant margain.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Seriously? Hummingbird was developed by Samsung and Intrinsity (who Apple later acquired) and Appe used that same CPU core in A4. It's also worth mentioning that Hummingbird had double the GPU performance of A4.

The Galaxy S didn't build upon the Evo either, they were released fairly close together and the Galaxy S out sold it by a significant margain.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3665/apples-intrinsity-acquisition-winners-and-losers

Just a side note, but according to Anandtech, that's not the case. Samsung likely asked Intrinsity on behalf of Apple, which means the IP belonged to Intrinsity as a whole, and then it was transferred to Apple after the acquisition. It makes sense, because even now, I don't think Samsung has demonstrated that they have the capability to design custom ARM CPU cores. They have been implementing standard ARM cores (Cortex A9) in their Exynos SoC ever since without any modification to the cores.

Maybe "stealing" was a strong word since obviously, Samsung implemented the core that Intrinsity designed before Apple acquired Intrinsity, but for all intents and purposes, it's not Samsung that created the core, and the whole credit should be given to Intrinsity instead.

And I think the bottom line is still that Samsung did not get to where they are now without the help of others. So it's not right to think Samsung alone made Android the success it is today.

 

[BladeVenom]

Actually, if you'd consider it, 2.8% of... $600B is really... a hell of a lot of money.

I'm not sure Samsung's 8.3% holds up when their on-hand cash is literally 1/10 that of Apple. 8.3% of Samsung is more like 0.2% of Apple in this context.

But Nokia and Microsoft deserve a standing ovation in that chart. They have a lot of cash, but they still dedicate a sizable amount to R&D.

It's a percentage of sales.

Apple had $108 billion in sales in 2011. So based on 2.8% average that would have been $3 billion in R&D

Samsung Electronics had $148 billion in sales in 2011. That would be over $12 billion in R&D.

The R&D is based on 5 year average, so that would just be an estimate of what they spent in 2011. Apple actually spent $2.4 billion on R&D in 2011. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312511282113/d220209d10k.htm

I'm surprised MS spent that much. They didn't use to. I guess falling behind Apple and Google, and being more in the hardware market now has made them spend more.

 

[runawayprisoner]

It's a percentage of sales.

Apple had $108 billion in sales in 2011. So based on 2.8% average that would have been $3 billion in R&D

Samsung Electronics had $148 billion in sales in 2011. That would be over $12 billion in R&D.

The R&D is based on 5 year average, so that would just be an estimate of what they spent in 2011. Apple actually spent $2.4 billion on R&D in 2011. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312511282113/d220209d10k.htm

I'm surprised MS spent that much. They didn't use to. I guess falling behind Apple and Google, and being more in the hardware market now has made them spend more.

Ah, I see, that makes more sense.

In that case, I'm actually surprised that Samsung is spending so much in R&D but getting so little return.

Here's another interesting chart from the original source of the R&D/sales % chart:

Source here: http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/30/yo...edium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Asymco+(asymco)

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I love XDA but a bunch of people there have a really over inflated sense of their own importance.

I cant stand to read anything on their forums. I just use it to download a ROM and thats it. The division of fanboys between ROM developers are crazy.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Voice your concerns to Samsung! They're at least work with devs unlike Motorola.

 

[runawayprisoner]

"We're discussing it with our team" = "We refuse to pay people to port legible source codes and write human-readable documentations so suck it until we decide otherwise"

Corporate speak...

 

[Puddle Jumper]

"We're discussing it with our team" = "We refuse to pay people to port legible source codes and write human-readable documentations so suck it until we decide otherwise"

Corporate speak...

And yet they are still 1000x as developer friendly as HTC or Motorola.

Oddly enough my developer unfriendly Exynos powered Galaxy S2 has tons of custom roms for both ICS and JB but my OMAP 4 powered tablet doesn't have any despite being based on the ICS reference platform.

 

[zoiks]

"We're discussing it with our team" = "We refuse to pay people to port legible source codes and write human-readable documentations so suck it until we decide otherwise"

Corporate speak...

You mean how Apple did the same to KDE when contributing to webkit? Full of shitty code with no documentation.