Samsung caught presenting actors as Galaxy Tab "consumers," fudging thinnest tablet claims - Page 4

What else is Samsung going to do? Beat the iPad?

...then it wouldn't be Deception... it would be a transparent lie and viewers would recognize the transparency.

In this case the deception was short lived. Thank you to those that uncovered the lie. I really appreciate it.

How do you know?

Forgive me if I'm being nitpicky but don't you usually have to have a real story to portray a real story or are you saying that the actors pretending to be actual customers is the real story and they made a real story about a fake story... or.... uh... sorry, I'm confused... could you help me out a little...

iPad launch.



Samsung (or any other tablet) launch.

I've used Windows-based tablets going back before 2000 (yes, they existed), and the technology was available back then just couldn't cut it: battery, screen, processor speed, pen input. For years, Microsoft saw tablets as an "extension" of their desktop OS, with a pen replacing the mouse, and on-screen keyboard that you would have to peck at with the pen. Those Windows tablets were heavy--like holding a 15" MacBook Pro in one hand. And chunkier than a modern MBP.

It shows that it's hard for companies that think in one direction to think in a completely opposite direction. That's the one thing Apple did right with the Newton... they were not thinking about replacing a mouse with a pen with a desktop OS, but creating an entirely new type of device, using the paradigm of a "digital notepad". It cost less than a PC, lighter than any Windows tablet, and the UI didn't suffer from being adapted from a desktop OS (no tablet should ever force users to have to "right click" with a pen, talk about getting it wrong).

Nah, I don't think Apple fans are taking Samsung seriously in this case. They just wanna laugh their hearts out watching this circus performed by Samsung.

He/she doesn't.

The end.

Not just Samsung... if it's true that Moto canned the first Xoom already then we get to see Part Deux of the hilarious new comedy... Pad Wars!

I cant wait for the third part of the trilogy when RIM hits the big screen with The Saga of the Playbook.

Damn. Now he won't take the bait.

(It's funny though that he lied to defend Sammy lies.)

Not just Apple fans. I read this on PC Magazine's site:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382515,00.asp

Even Moto's sad advertising for the Xoom is getting noticed by PC fans. Apple just got it right.

I suppose anyone who tries to "pull a fast one" (I love that English expression!) should expect a certain amount of shame and "tsk! tsk!" from people in general as well as chortles of unbridled glee from their opposition, but I find myself oddly conflicted at moments like this...almost like walking a tightrope of expectations over a safety net of hopes which may ultimately prove more illusory than anything else.

Take the present case of the latest Galaxy Tab. On one hand, having just purchased an iPad 2, I hope that whatever Samsung has just introduced will in no way make me regret having just spent my hard-earned money on an Apple product (that's the good thing about Steve Job's being in the mix - such a regret of that nature will rarely happen when competing products are introduced within the same (or similar) time period).

On the other hand - oddly enough, provided the first condition above is met, I actually want the competing product to be so good that it sets into motion a powerfully competing wave-front to the RDF wave-front Steve (and hence Apple) generates, so that it drives Apple to produce downstream a much better product than they might actually have done without the competition, thereby (hopefully) ensuring that when I upgrade in two to three years, I will again be benefitted by all of this back-channel impetus.

So when I see a BlackBerry or Dell or Samsung tablet, barring the possibility of feeling dejected for just having wasted my own money on an inferior competing Apple product (which is usually not the case), or if it has a significantly later market introduction than the Apple competing product I just bought, I actually want it to be the very best it can be.

I have read recently in these forums certain comment which make a good point that the outcome of competing products may not always be a better downstream Apple product. This was an interesting perspective and one which I feel has considerable merit (depending on how one frames the viewpoint and conditions surrounding it).

Part of the dichotomy may be driven by the fact that Steve Jobs often marches to a "different drummer" - so a nearby band with a synchopated drum beat will have little or no effect on him. What I think would be really interesting is if another, younger "Jobs" (I understand he is unique but hopefully you get my drift) were to emerge at a competing company and start leveraging his own RDF there to his inevitable benefit.

Would such a competing RDF then affect Apple products so that the downstream benefits for the "end-user" (like me) would be greater?

what is so interesting about this incident is not the ad ethics or management sloppiness of what Samsung did. those are laughable but small potatoes.

instead, happening at such a high-profile event as CTIA, it bespeaks - shouts actually - a sense of desperation on Samsung's part to be seen as "the" leading rival to Apple and the iPad. so they overreach badly, try too hard to create an Apple-style hype for a product still under development - after clumsily dropping plans for its "V" predecessor they were hyping just two months ago at another major trade show. so they wind up looking silly. very silly.

manufacturing 2.1 million of the premature 7" Galaxy tab late last year was an incredible blunder. it's highly unlikely they sold even half of them. they will take a loss on it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. why would they do something so risky? the only logical reason was a hope to overwhelm the nascent Android tab market with the Samsung brand before any other competition could launch a product. but the product was fatally flawed!

then instead Google blessed Motorola as its first Android tablet avatar, with the Xoom. to be followed this year by the rest of the "Android army" with their iPad knock-offs (plus RIM and HP).

i think Samsung has a serious case of "Apple envy," maybe hoping to become the Apple of Asia, whatever that means to them - the leader in developing new consumer technology. which title Sony used to hold, until Apple took them down.

but the problem is, they don't have the chops.

great hardware engineering, which Samsung (and Sony) has, is not enuff. great software is much harder to do, and they can't. and real vision is beyond their reach - it's priceless.

Congrats on the Baghdad Bob reference. It should be repeated every time Seoul City Sam (Sam Sung?) comes back with some more of his lame-ass propaganda.

"This picture of a model holding a 2"-thick digital picture frame with another picture on it totally proves that that much thinner Galaxy Tab whose empty case they waved around at a trade show really, really, really exists and is pwning Apple even as we speak!"

I really wish Samsung would stick to what they do well, because they do it very, very well. I've got a Samsung TV that I'm tremendously impressed with. The picture quality and the build quality are just fantastic. (Of course, the menu structure is totally dementedthey should farm out stuff like that.) My first VCR was a Samsung 25 (no, 26!) years ago. (That's not what it said on the case, but it was a Samsung.) I had that thing for many years; it never ate a tape and you could have hit it with a shotgun and it would have kept on playing.

So you can see I'm not a Samsung hater (or Korean electronics hater.) I just wish they would do what they do and not try to be something elsethey're already one of the biggest industrial combines in the world. Enough already!

Forget about tablets. Samsung should just concentrate on churning out as many A5 chips possible as Apple will sell millions and millions of iPad, iPhone, iPod touch (and maybe Apple TV) this year.

Samsung = Ho hum Copiers


Samsung just like all the rest trying to copy what it cannot beat!

Why on earth would a company hold a press conference and not have an actual working device?

Because they must keep their name in the press as they scramble to stay on par with Apple.

Samsung failed miserably to impress anyone.

I'm not really an AI commenter. I just play one on my Mac screen. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night!! :lol

Wow. Too funny.
When people exhibit such inability to perceive reality and make judgments and distinctions between those perceptions, there really is nothing to say, nowhere to go.

This shameless infomercial is beyond cringeworthy. Reminded me of the abominable Philips CDi infomercial of the early '90s, "Wall"

I think Samsung just needs to relax and take their time. The iPad is already in a position of dominance, so no point trying to rush a product to market to prevent that from happening. They should take one of the open source OSes, build their own touch GUI for it, and go from there.

I imagine Samsung (like Google RE: GoogleMaps) has killed their golden goose (revenues from manufacturing the A5.) Fortunately for them Apple has no alternative sources for flash RAM and multitouch screens.
History shows that Steve remembers treachery and always punishes it.

The reason they look like they have been gambling all night is because they probably haven't slept since the iPad 2 was announced. They probably haven't left the office to go to there homes to shave and change clothes. They've been up 24/7 and at the office trying to figure out how to cram the fat tab into that thin case and fool the world into thinking they have something.

Seriously? That's the best excuse you could come up with?

There are legions of Fandroids who would be extremely happy to go on camera with a pre-released Android tablet and spout platitudes for weeks. Finding someone to say something nice isn't the problem. The problem is that few of these Fandroids actually look like the people in the videos. Most of the hard core Android fan base are IT professionals who look like, well, IT professionals.

This whole thing was obviously handled by Samsung's marketing and ad people who did what they always do....they hire actors. The nice thing about actors is that you can easily cast for a specific look/type of person and get that person to say whatever message you are trying to convey.

The real problem here is that actors were passed as as real life people who weren't actors wity the exception of the film director and he has already been outed as working for Samsung before (which is why Samsung's ad people thought of him in the first place). This was completely unnecessary. You could have put the product in a bunch of people's hands, filmed how they used it and came back for comments.

But the second problem here is that the product (as announced) does not yet exist. The ad people literally had nothing to work with except for the 7" Galaxy Tab which has been out for months now. Even on stage the prototypes weren't working (nor in the booth). The reason they are non-functional is that Samsung's own VP spoke of having to "go back to the drawing board". It was a freudian slip since it basically encapsulated in a nutshell the "oh s#%t!" moment that all had when the iPad 2 dropped and they compared it to the specs of their soon-to-be-announced Galaxy Tabs that had already been designed and were moving through the supply chain to be manufactured soon. All that had to be stopped at great expense and "go back to the drawing board". When can you get a Tab 10.1? June. How about a 8.9? Sometime in "early summer". Really guys? You've had a year to do this and by the time summer gets here, Apple will have moved 10 million iPad 2s easy.

Samsung tried to make the best out of a horrible situation for them. The late launch of the 10.1 and 8.9 is bad enough but the last thing you needed was the press to put 2 and 2 together about the testimonials from "excited users". I'm sure someone in the Android camp will note that in January 2007, the press wasn't allowed to use the iPhone as announced until when it was ready to ship in June. But at least Steve Jobs used a working prototype on stage as opposed to showing nice slide mockups and animations.

...small print on the bottom, like in the car ads "Professional driver on a closed course. Don't drive like this nitwit in your own car anywhere on earth..."

The could say "Professional actor being paid to shill this crap. Buy at your own risk..."

There was nothing professional about that acting...

AI posters, I haven't laughed so hard for a long time. Your sense of humour and well written comments crack me up. Keep 'em coming!

Maybe that's a new category of acting: "If I were a paid actor, would I be this lousy? LOL! You can totally believe what I say!"

Actually I thought the acting was pretty good. A female actress portraying a fragment of a N.O.W. illusion. The illusion of the whole "Broadway Show" was right on the money. The illusion that she actually had the tab to use and do all those things with it before it existed. To pull off that, you have to be a professional actor.

...we ARE going to ignore the huge sums that Apple pays for product placement in all those TV and movie dramas, right? But then, we KNOW the shows are fiction and the actors are, well, ACTORS.

Edited.

Misread your post.

"Call me Joe."

I just love to stir the pot.

The average Fandroid, the kind who likes to root their devices, looks like this.

Re: product placement. How sure are we that Apple is paying anybody to show their computers on TV and in the movies? I think prop guys just use them because they're more photogenic than the other brands. Most of the time when they turn them around so you can only see the screen, you see they're running Windows—I don't know if Apple would pay for that.

Then of course, for the last 3 years, every Apple computer on TV has had to have a sticker over the Apple logo so they don't get inundated with hate mail from right-wingers still infuriated about Apple's contribution to the "No on 8" campaign. (Of course, Google contributed as much or more, but that's OK.) Would Apple pay for that?

I remember trying to sign up for the free limited service on one ISP, just as a backup, only to discover that you couldn't use a Mac on their service at all. Subsequently, I got a flyer in the mail from them, depicting dozens of happy people using their service, half of whom were using MacBooks. I know damn well Apple didn't pay for that!

First, there's no evidence of that, but even if it's true, what difference does it make?

When you watch The Office and the people are using a computer, do you take that as a real-life testimonial? Or, more appropriately for the age group of most of the Apple-bashers here, when you see a Pear computer on iCarly, do you think that's the real choice of real-life characters?

The problem for Samsung is not that they paid people to advertise their product. The problem is that they LIED when they claimed that they were real people rather than paid actors. Apple never did that.

i've always assumed all those heart-warming Apple commercials and demo clips were pure fiction with actors. even all the kids. and that Apple spends a lot getting product placement in TV and movies. and also a lot on featured pop artists. and spends tons on billboards. and all the rest. Apple never said they don't. actually, Apple never says anything at all about its marketing ...

no question Apple runs the state of the art consumer tech marketing machine today. really, in a class all by itself.

but you never see the Apple guy in charge of this marketing empire. who is he/she? they are never on stage at any event. nothing gets in the way of the message.

OK. Product placement. Maybe I was wrong. Supposedly Apple does not pay for product placement, according to the Washngton Post article, so I will stand corrected on this point. Like… never mind.

http://www.edibleapple.com/the-signi...uct-placement/

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog...as-everything/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041401670.html

I've heard they don't either but I noticed at the end of House during the credits "promotional consideration was provided by the following... Apple (and others). Guess I'll have to read the links you provided, maybe they will explain it.