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Another iPhone alternative.

V

Vtorch

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2006
31
0
http://gps.engadget.com/2007/02/08/samsung-outdoes-itself-with-ultra-smart-f700/

This one is from Samsung. I am sure very soon we will see Palm's, Motorola's, and Sony's answer to the iPhone as well.

Samsung Ultra Smart F700

samsung-ultra-f700.jpg
 
Too bad nobody outside the tech enthusiast community is every going to know about this phone. There's no marketing push, no availability outside the U.S., etc. I didn't see it on CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek or any other news site. Sure, it's probably a really great phone, but unless they generate some serious buzz and make it available in the U.S., nobody really cares.
 
smartphone market is small (5% of total cell), and now, these high end, high price (>$500 with contract) smartphones rush out in batches, how exactly do they think they gonna profit from these?
 
clevin said:
smartphone market is small (5% of total cell), and now, these high end, high price (>$500 with contract) smartphones rush out in batches, how exactly do they think they gonna profit from these?
Click to expand...

Well, I'm not sure what the business case of these things is like... in terms of how many units tooling costs are amortized over. Like Jobs said, the cell market is huge in terms of volume -- capturing even 1% is a phenomenal sales opportunity. If these phones are designed to be profitable selling only 1 million units or so, that's actually probably realistic for several phones like this.
 
mkrishnan said:
Well, I'm not sure what the business case of these things is like... in terms of how many units tooling costs are amortized over. Like Jobs said, the cell market is huge in terms of volume -- capturing even 1% is a phenomenal sales opportunity. If these phones are designed to be profitable selling only 1 million units or so, that's actually probably realistic for several phones like this.
Click to expand...

total smartphone sale last year is 17.7m(world wide), this year probably 20m, 1m out of them is a difficult task for a high priced phone, and now this market is further divided into several part, LG, iPhone, Samsung and other alternatives..... well, somebody must be very optimistic and confidence.:D lets wait and see how good they will be on the market.
 
clevin said:
...1m out of them is a difficult task for a high priced phone....
Click to expand...

See, again, this is the part I'm not sure about... kind of the same conversation we had about subcompacts. I'm not sure why a company like Nokia or Samsung can't make a very fancy phone like this with a business case that creates 40-50% profit margins assuming that they only sell one million altogether (i.e. over two or three years, not annually). Granted that there's a lot of custom tooling for each new phone, why does the global production of an individual model need to be five or six million before it's profitable? There are many throw-away entry-level models made by Samsung and the like that certainly are not selling that many units, and are presumably still not causing the OEMs to hemorrhage money.

If there's a future in these kind of status symbol phones, anyway, it has to be in profitability at lower volumes, I think. High-volume status phones (like the RAZR, love it or hate it) are a rarity (much like the iPod)... they're the "blockbuster" drug of the crop. The majority of status symbol-oriented products are going to have to be designed to be profitable at lower volumes.
 
MovieCutter said:
Too bad nobody outside the tech enthusiast community is every going to know about this phone. There's no marketing push, no availability outside the U.S., etc. I didn't see it on CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek or any other news site. Sure, it's probably a really great phone, but unless they generate some serious buzz and make it available in the U.S., nobody really cares.
Click to expand...

Ummm - it's on the front page of Google news with links to PC World, InfoSyncWorld, Playfuls.com, ITWire, Trusted Reviews, Computerworld, International Herald Tribune and 119 other sites.

It's a big story now and it's only been public for a few hours.
 
Stella said:
Smartphone statistics.. interesting!
http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html

I tried cutting and pasting the
"Canalys worldwide total smartphone device market - market shares 2006 Q3 2005 / Q3 2006"

table but the format screws up - marketshare for all the smartphone vendors.
Click to expand...
Ooops, i guess i used wrong #. 17.7m is PDA shipment.
i need to check more about the sales of smartphones

but on another note, Symbian covers ALOT of low-end smartphones, can't be really in direct competition with these high-end stuff.
 
My guesses:
1. More expensive than the iPhone (est. 799-899) with contract.
2. No phone company will carry it in the states unless they strip it down some (lose the 3g, the camera, wifi, etc - Look at Nokia E61 to E62 for instance)
3. OS (probably linux or symbian by the look of the photos) is not near as advanced as OS X which is in the iPhone.
4. No word on shipping date, this sadly as the iPhone appears to be a prototype. I have seen prototype mobile phones before never make an actual model.
5. Not aimed at the iPhone market. Apple is hoping people who have bought iPods before will chose an all in one device to store their music, videos, contacts, pictures, and oh by the way use it as a phone. Samsung is trying to attract people from the Blackberry, Palm, WM crowd (business oriented)
 
revfife said:
3. OS (probably linux or symbian by the look of the photos) is not near as advanced as OS X which is in the iPhone.
Click to expand...

u don't need a rocket to kill a bug. Advanced as "OSX" is, it doesn't necessarily mean much.
 
aricher said:
Ummm - it's on the front page of Google news with links to PC World, InfoSyncWorld, Playfuls.com, ITWire, Trusted Reviews, Computerworld, International Herald Tribune and 119 other sites.

It's a big story now and it's only been public for a few hours.
Click to expand...

Ummmmmm, this story broke yesterday, and all those sites are exactly what I said in my post...tech enthusiast sites. Until I hear Jim Cramer, Wolf Blitzer, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and my parents talking about it, it's not that big.
 
clevin said:
Ooops, i guess i used wrong #. 17.7m is PDA shipment.
i need to check more about the sales of smartphones

but on another note, Symbian covers ALOT of low-end smartphones, can't be really in direct competition with these high-end stuff.
Click to expand...

There aren't really any low end Symbian smartphones - most of them are quite expensive. Only in the past year have there been Symbian phoned released by Nokia and Sony Ericsson that target the mid range phones.

Personally, I'd call the E61, E70, 9200, 9300, P9xx, M600, N92, 93, 95 high end smartphones and can certainly compete with the others.

revfife said:
3. OS (probably linux or symbian by the look of the photos) is not near as advanced as OS X which is in the iPhone.
Click to expand...
Its not Symbian - unless Samsung have created their own UI - its not Series 60 or UIQ.

Spec link ( although it doesn't say not Symbian )
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20070208_0000320566


Define "advanced"? Symbian OS is a very very capable OS, that is targetted specifically towards smartphones and therefore is very optimsed - more so than any other smartphone OS. However, this done have the side effect of being a complete ass to code against.

Symbian OS can do anything that we've seen the iPhone do. Symbian isn't into defining the UI - thats what Series60 and UIQ are for ( I'm saying OK - smartphone based phones don't have as nice GUI! ).

Also it doesn't require .5 Gig storage space to store the OS, unlike the iPhone!!!
 
Here is another iPhone competitor. This one happens to come from one Apple, Inc's closest and dearest friends.......Microsoft (LOL)

Before everyone poo-poos this because it's Microsoft, keep in mind that as much as Apple is linking the iPhone with the success of it's iPod and iTunes, Microsoft will do the same with their phone and the Xbox.

(of course, the picture below is a photoshopped...obviously)

http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/09/zn...o-4g-wimax-action-rumors-off-the-wtf-o-meter/

zunephonecrunchgear.jpg
 
Ummmmmm, it's now featured prominently on the San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Boston Herald, MacWorld, Wired, San Jose Mercury News, Newsday, London Times, Denver Post, FOX News, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Washington Post, Seattle Post Intelligencer and a ton more magazines and papers...

Or are Newsweek and the Washington Post not mainstream enough for you?



MovieCutter said:
Ummmmmm, this story broke yesterday, and all those sites are exactly what I said in my post...tech enthusiast sites. Until I hear Jim Cramer, Wolf Blitzer, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and my parents talking about it, it's not that big.
Click to expand...
 
Unspeaked said:
Ummmmmm, it's now featured prominently on the San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Boston Herald, MacWorld, Wired, San Jose Mercury News, Newsday, London Times, Denver Post, FOX News, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Washington Post, Seattle Post Intelligencer and a ton more magazines and papers...

Or are Newsweek and the Washington Post not mainstream enough for you?
Click to expand...

I want what you're smoking. I did a search for "Samsung" and "iPhone" on almost every site's front page you referred...no mention of Samsung or iPhone. Not even a mention on most of the site's TECH pages. My point stands. Nobody in the mainstream cares or knows about this thing. It poses absolutely no threat to the iPhone.
 
i like the fact that the samsung's got a keyboard, which helps text messaging and other software (nav) a lot! but it is really too bad that it uses samsung's own OS instead of symbian.

don't expect too much from palm. i doubt palm will come out with a comparable, or any innovative products ever. enthusiasts had long been asking the company to produce a more capable multimedia mobile phone, but palm just never got its act together. palm has also been said to switch to ALP long time ago, but so far we only get a few colored treo w/ the dated garnet. i liked palm, but i gave up on the company since m505.

SE has already released comparable devices since last year - W950 and P990i. both models are symbian-based (UIQ 3) with touch screens. the W950 has 4GB internal memory while the P990i features wifi, camera, flash, etc.

Vtorch said:
http://gps.engadget.com/2007/02/08/samsung-outdoes-itself-with-ultra-smart-f700/

This one is from Samsung. I am sure very soon we will see Palm's, Motorola's, and Sony's answer to the iPhone as well.

Samsung Ultra Smart F700

samsung-ultra-f700.jpg
Click to expand...
 
Vtorch said:
Here is another iPhone competitor. This one happens to come from one Apple, Inc's closest and dearest friends.......Microsoft (LOL)

Before everyone poo-poos this because it's Microsoft, keep in mind that as much as Apple is linking the iPhone with the success of it's iPod and iTunes, Microsoft will do the same with their phone and the Xbox.

(of course, the picture below is a photoshopped...obviously)

http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/09/zn...o-4g-wimax-action-rumors-off-the-wtf-o-meter/

zunephonecrunchgear.jpg
Click to expand...

it was reported to be fake, M$ didn't prepare a cellphone after all.

Stella said:
There aren't really any low end Symbian smartphones - most of them are quite expensive. Only in the past year have there been Symbian phoned released by Nokia and Sony Ericsson that target the mid range phones.

Personally, I'd call the E61, E70, 9200, 9300, P9xx, M600, N92, 93, 95 high end smartphones and can certainly compete with the others.
Click to expand...
ooh, I really considered smartphones of <$200 as low-end.
 
MovieCutter said:
I want what you're smoking. I did a search for "Samsung" and "iPhone" on almost every site's front page you referred...no mention of Samsung or iPhone. Not even a mention on most of the site's TECH pages. My point stands. Nobody in the mainstream cares or knows about this thing. It poses absolutely no threat to the iPhone.
Click to expand...

Whatever I'm smoking, it's certainly not clouding my search abilities as badly as yours seem to be:

Forbes

Washington Post

MSNBC

ABC News

NY Daily News

MacWorld

San Francisco Chronicle

Boston Herald

Newsday

Wired

San Jose Mercury News

Seattle Post Intelligencer
 
Unspeaked said:
Whatever I'm smoking, it's certainly not clouding my search abilities as badly as yours seem to be:
Click to expand...

No, but it's clouding your ability to read. You did a search for the product on each site using its search function...congratulations. But MY POINT...again...which you missed yet again, was that the story was not on the front page of the site, or even the front of the tech section of each site when I did the search a couple hours after your claim. It got pushed aside so quickly that nobody who was browsing those sites would have seen it. AGAIN...my point stands...nobody cares. To further strengthen my point, on ABC News's tech section, there are 2 iPhone stories STILL on the front page a whole month after its introduction.
 
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