Samsung Focusing On Phone Software

itwbennett writes "With the much-acclaimed Galaxy SIII in its pocket, don't think that Samsung is looking at Amazon's success with the Kindle and Apple's success with its iOS devices and saying to themselves, 'No, we'd rather not have that kind of diverse revenue, we'll stick to razor-thin hardware margins,' writes blogger Kevin Purdy. And that's not the only reason that Samsung might decide the time is right to maintain its own OS, or at least an Android fork: There's also the looming spectre of Google-Motorola."

Comments

bada

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung already has their own OS, bada, and it's crap.

SuperAMOLED+

[PhrostyMcByte]

So long as Samsung continues to be the sole producer of phones with SuperAMOLED+ screens, they've got my dollar secured. I'd much rather have those deep blacks than a Retina screen.

Of course if I was an Android user, I may be worried about Samsung creating their own fork which is almost guaranteed to be worse than vanilla. They may end up driving more users away with this than they'd gain.

Re:SuperAMOLED+

[Miamicanes]

> Unless they hire a bunch of the top guys from XDA, their software will continue to be absolute shyte no one wants on their phone :(

You mean, like the guy behind Cyanogen? He's been a Samsung employee for about a year now. It's not a coincidence that Samsung has suddenly become one of the first-ported platforms for new versions of Cyanogen. Hiring him was a brilliant move for Samsung, because it allowed them to outsource the long-term development of their phone operating system for EOL'ed phones to an army of highly-skilled unpaid volunteers. Since he's an official Samsung employee, they can even let him have access to sourcecode, SDKs, and datasheets that companies like Qualcomm won't allow them to release to the general public. Thus, when a new version of Android gets released, he can personally churn out a new kerneland kernel modules for everything Samsung has soucecode access to within a matter of days He doesn't have time to indiscriminately REWRITE much beyond a few carefully-chosen phone models, but for any task that mainly comes down to dropping in the new kernel source and running make, Samsung phones are literally weeks to months ahead of HTC phones now.

That said, it's a good thing Samsung doesn't lock bootloaders and has Cyanogen's founder working for them, because their own in-house operating system development efforts have historically sucked donkey dick. Sprint's history of Samsung phones is littered with the corpses of unloved phones released with operating systems that were already considered old the PREVIOUS YEAR. The SPH-i300 shipped with PalmOS 3.5... when all the new apps at Palmgear needed 4. The SPH-i500 shipped with glorious 4.1, when all the new apps at Palmgear needed 5. Every phone had the potential to be great, but ended up getting ruined by arriving a year late and a few excessively value-engineered dollars short of tolerability.

Strange comments from the article

[cpu6502]

- "Do you actually have anything of substance to write? This says 'slow news day by a lazy writer' all over the place to me."
- "It's click bait, something to get his numbers up and make it seem like he is being productive."

The article was interesting enough to make slashdot. (shrug)

Re:Meego v2?

[Microlith]

Samsung has the rump of Meego in the form of Tizen

There's nothing MeeGo about Tizen. Some existing projects from Intel might make their way in, but nothing of MeeGo proper is present. As it stands, Tizen is just SLP made public with investment from Intel and more public than LiMo (albeit without any sort of community input that I can see.)

Other than that, the current Tizen push to have no native software at all, focusing entirely on HTML5 software (which, in the face of Android and iOS support for native development is suicide.) As someone who attended the Tizen summit in San Francisco back in May, this has greatly discouraged me and sharply tempered my interest in the platform. I'll keep my ears open and fiddle with my reference unit, but it looks like I'm stuck with my N900 for yet more time until something drops that can actually replace it (hopefully giving me the option of root that I want.)

First support your phones

[MeNeXT]

For some of us who have older S's (1.5 years) Samsung needs to support their phones like Apple does. Get us the updates.

If you need to look at how well Samsung can fail in their own software look at Kies. Poor platform support apart from Windows. Poor older phone support. Come on Samusung get with the big boys. Not everyone can upgrade every year. remind us why we should be loyal.

Re:Let's hope not...

[thegarbz]

However, Samsung's never seemed to me to be even remotely competent with software.

This is an understatement. Samsung aren't only experts in pushing buggy software a lot of their results end up being blatant rip-offs of other software. They have three notable WTF-were-they-thinking moments:

- Touchwiz: This has to be the least stable launcher I have every experienced on a phone. It was slow, jerky, used a lot of memory (By Samsung's own admission Touchwiz is why the the old Galaxy S won't get ICS because the hardware is underpowered... which is news to me since I already run ICS), and cloned much of the early elements from Apple.

- Keis: A blatant rip-off attempt at iTunes which is slower (hard to believe I know) and is horrendously broken. I've never plugged a Samsung phone in and been able to apply an update without issue. The most recent attempt at upgrading a Galaxy S II resulted in an error message entirely written in Korean. The consensus seems to be that it's much safer to perform a firmware upgrade by hacking around with tarballs and a complicated flashing utility than it is to simply hit one button in the manufacturer's own software.

- RFS (resulting in a horrendous Galaxy S experience): Let's take an old file system, attach a journal to it, put a second file allocation table in it for redundancy, and then name it RobustFS and claim it was specifically designed for NAND memory. Oh while we're at it we'll write the worlds slowest kernel driver for it too. This file system and its implementation resulted in Android actually force closing apps because the OS thought they took so long accessing the file system that they locked up. It was a problem in Android 2.1 and 2.2 ... AND 2.3 despite some hundreds of firmware releases around the world between these versions. Yet the xda-developers solved the issue in a really short time period and now searching "Lag-fix galaxy s" on Google returns some 600000 hits.

Yeah I fully see Samsung having success with their own OS /sarcasm