Thank you, Daniel Dilger for your remembering and archiving and strategically reproducing old articles that highlight the folly and deception that so many "hit-whore journalists" inaccurately throw out as "factual reports" over time that so often prove to be deceptive, grossly inaccurate, and frequently even invented or dishonest. You manage to expose so many blatantly inaccurate stories and pundits over many, many years. (So many of them deserve to have their careers ruined. And the same goes for a lot of the financial analysts fraternity as well!). Thank you SO much for your great international research and well-written reporting which so aids cleaning up the tech press and serves to try to keep them honest! With respect to THAT mission, YOU and writers like Philip Elmer-Dewitt will NEVER be out of work, unfortunately.
Samsung was making Windows Mobile and Symbian phones before the iPhone appeared. It was most famous for its "BlackJack" copy of of the BlackBerry. The company didn’t ever not copy.
And no, in 2010 the year they cloned the iPhone 3GS, their profits more than doubled, and just kept increasing as they cloned the iPad and every Apple app and the packaging and accessories and retail store designs and ads. Trying to say Samsung developed some original design as the basis for its success just makes you look foolish.
Believing that their success is solely based on them copying Apple is what's foolish. Yes they fooled some people into buying the SGS 2 but they didn't fool anyone into buying a SGS 3 because they thought it was a iPhone. I did not know a single person with a SGS 2 but I know many with the SGS 3 and some were previous iPhone owners and when I ask why they switched the answer was never "because it's so much like the iPhone" it was "because it's different from the iPhone"
This confirms my belief that Japanese people value honor, craftsmanship, and beauty. Everything that Apple is and Samdung isn't. I've never seen a Japanese person sport an ugly 6 inch plastic Samdung POS.
My Grandmother is 100% Japanese and she would always pay extra to get the better product. She would rather have nothing than compromise and buy an imitation product.
Funny how Apple dominates markets that have alot of money and education? While Samdung fleeces poor and uneducated markets by bombarding them with endless advertisements and paid shrills.
2014 will be the year Samdung will be exposed for what they truly are. A second rate company that rose to prominence because of copying.
Totally agree. Japanese people are totally classy! High fashion lovers, good taste, hard workers. I am a greek, i have nothing to do with Japan, but i love and appreciate this country's spirit!
Believing that their success is solely based on them copying Apple is what's foolish. Yes they fooled some people into buying the SGS 2 but they didn't fool anyone into buying a SGS 3 because they thought it was a iPhone. I did not know a single person with a SGS 2 but I know many with the SGS 3 and some were previous iPhone owners and when I ask why they switched the answer was never "because it's so much like the iPhone" it was "because it's different from the iPhone"
Samsung’s copycat marketing and IP appropriation created in impression that Samsung phones were equivalent to Apple’s iPhone. Once you do that, it’s easy to introduce some original gimmicks and make arbitrary changes and then pretend that you earned your own success. Just ask Microsoft.
That said, there is no real market data showing that iPhone users migrated to Samsung devices in any significant numbers. The reality is that Symbian/WiMo/Palm users and lots of feature phone and new users began buying (or getting for free) Samsung phones because Samsung heavily marketed its products as being "pretty much an iPhone" to a generation of new users.
It wasn’t Android attracting them, and it wasn’t Samsung’s UI layers or other features, all of which have been copied by other companies that are not successful. Samsung stood out from the Android offerings because it was created and marketed as an Android-based iPhone clone.
Anyone can cite anecdotes about what their friends think, but that doesn’t mean much because anyone can say anything in insignificant numbers.
Samsung stood out from the Android offerings because it was created and marketed as an Android-based iPhone clone.
On this point I disagree, before the SGS 3 Samsung phones were not the Android device of choice, Motorola and HTC were, and never once did I see Samsung advertise any of their devices as "pretty much like an iPhone", and if you have a link of proof I'd like to see it.
Thank you, Daniel Dilger for your remembering and archiving and strategically reproducing old articles that highlight the folly and deception that so many "hit-whore journalists" inaccurately throw out as "factual reports" over time that so often prove to be deceptive, grossly inaccurate, and frequently even invented or dishonest.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
Not the point. Chen is the tool ( one of many) feeding a mass of publishing whores and their chase for advert $ driven by a negative news slant that pervades the media.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
It’s not an example of a mistake, it’s an example of setting out to write a particular story, interviewing sources that tell you that you are wrong and provide conflicting information, and then going ahead with a story you know is wrong, embellished with false quotations that say somebody in another country is saying what you’d have liked them to say.
Seeing that every openly presented gives you some insight into how blog-journalism works. Ignoring it as old history means you get to repeat it in ignorance of how the game is played.
If you don’t give a "rat’s ass" about facts or realty, there are plenty of sites crafting bullshit you can peruse in order to remain falsely informed.
On this point I disagree, before the SGS 3 Samsung phones were not the Android device of choice, Motorola and HTC were, and never once did I see Samsung advertise any of their devices as "pretty much like an iPhone", and if you have a link of proof I'd like to see it.
Why don’t you just go Google "Samsung packaging" and look at pictures yourself? I don’t think you need to be spoon fed anything.
Why don’t you just go Google "Samsung packaging" and look at pictures yourself? I don’t think you need to be spoon fed anything.
I didn't say that they didn't copy. They absolutely did, the charger, the packaging, amongst others, and do you honestly believe that someone bought a SGS 3 because the charger and packaging is like Apple's? Furthermore that's not the point I'm arguing. I believe that Samsung's success in the last 2 years or so has not been because they copied Apple but more so because of how they're different.
I have been living in Japan since 2005 and I remember the debut of the iPhone 3G here. It was a dud. For all the reasons mentioned in the cited WSJ and Wired articles. Japanese really liked and used features like NFC, TV tuners, Japanese SMS/MMS, carrier based web browsing and Japanese cell phone games. I believe this is why Softbank, the exclusive carrier at that time, stopped charging for the base model iPhone after just several months of its debut in 2008. Softbank has continued to offer free iPhones (the latest model or in the case of the 5c, free phone plus an extra $50 or so) to this day, and the other two iPhone carriers in Japan have followed the same pricing scheme.
However, the Japanese may have preferred their old cell phones, but now they have fallen in love with the iPhone and other smartphones. The features they wanted in their phones have been replaced with usable or superior alternatives. NFC is replaced with IC embedded cards, over the air TV with youtube, messaging with app based messaging (Line), carrier based web with the Internet, and favorite cell phone games are ported to the app store. In addition, Japanese used to pay a lot for premium services like GPS, videos and games via monthly subscription to the carrier. Now they can get them free or through a one time app purchase and use them without additional cost, since most people have flat-rate unlimited (throttled after 7GB) data plans for about $65 a month. So yes, Japanese love the iPhone today, but I don't think they did when it debuted.
I have been living in Japan since 2005 and I remember the debut of the iPhone 3G here. It was a dud. For all the reasons mentioned in the cited WSJ and Wired articles. Japanese really liked and used features like NFC, TV tuners, Japanese SMS/MMS, carrier based web browsing and Japanese cell phone games. I believe this is why Softbank, the exclusive carrier at that time, stopped charging for the base model iPhone after just several months of its debut in 2008. Softbank has continued to offer free iPhones (the latest model or in the case of the 5c, free phone plus an extra $50 or so) to this day, and the other two iPhone carriers in Japan have followed the same pricing scheme.
However, the Japanese may have preferred their old cell phones, but now they have fallen in love with the iPhone and other smartphones. The features they wanted in their phones have been replaced with usable or superior alternatives. NFC is replaced with IC embedded cards, over the air TV with youtube, messaging with app based messaging (Line), carrier based web with the Internet, and favorite cell phone games are ported to the app store. In addition, Japanese used to pay a lot for premium services like GPS, videos and games via monthly subscription to the carrier. Now they can get them free or through a one time app purchase and use them without additional cost, since most people have flat-rate unlimited (throttled after 7GB) data plans for about $65 a month. So yes, Japanese love the iPhone today, but I don't think they did when it debuted.
Meanwhile in Australia, I got my iPhone 3G free on a 24 month plan because that's the way we (used) to do things over here.
There was nothing unusual about Softbank adopting such a model.
Now we follow a semi-American model with handset payments added over the life of the contract for a lot of phones with only the cheaper ones for free.
I have been living in Japan since 2005 and I remember the debut of the iPhone 3G here. It was a dud. For all the reasons mentioned in the cited WSJ and Wired articles. Japanese really liked and used features like NFC, TV tuners, Japanese SMS/MMS, carrier based web browsing and Japanese cell phone games. I believe this is why Softbank, the exclusive carrier at that time, stopped charging for the base model iPhone after just several months of its debut in 2008. Softbank has continued to offer free iPhones (the latest model or in the case of the 5c, free phone plus an extra $50 or so) to this day, and the other two iPhone carriers in Japan have followed the same pricing scheme.
However, the Japanese may have preferred their old cell phones, but now they have fallen in love with the iPhone and other smartphones. The features they wanted in their phones have been replaced with usable or superior alternatives. NFC is replaced with IC embedded cards, over the air TV with youtube, messaging with app based messaging (Line), carrier based web with the Internet, and favorite cell phone games are ported to the app store. In addition, Japanese used to pay a lot for premium services like GPS, videos and games via monthly subscription to the carrier. Now they can get them free or through a one time app purchase and use them without additional cost, since most people have flat-rate unlimited (throttled after 7GB) data plans for about $65 a month. So yes, Japanese love the iPhone today, but I don't think they did when it debuted.
It seems to me it was liked as well as a foreign CE could be liked from the start.
This is from March 2009, which is within the first year of the iPhone being launched in Japan. "All that's clear is that while the iPhone might not be a strong player in Japan's mobile culture – and with no built-in TV, no multimedia messaging it's not a surprise - it seems that plenty of Japanese people like it well enough. Not as exciting, but probably a bit more realistic."
Good news piece. And thanks, DED, for bringing up Brian X Chen and his invented iPhone hit piece. If he had simply made an honest mistake in his research, correcting it as soon as the error was found, that would have been cool; forgive and forget, right? But he dishonestly made stuff up. He lied and passed it off as news, irking misquoted bloggers in Japan and causing WIRED to issue an apology. Yet amazingly, I see his name popping up here and there as a quoted "news" source again, even in Mac-related sites. Glad to see you put out this reminder of why Brian X Chen is a name to mistrust.
But on to a comment:
Quote:
Originally Posted by sog35
This confirms my belief that Japanese people value honor, craftsmanship, and beauty... I've never seen a Japanese person sport an ugly 6 inch plastic Samdung POS.
Er, smart shoppers anywhere value honor, craftsmanship, and beauty. Nothing "Japanese people" about it. And here in Tokyo, there are plenty of people with big Samsung or similar phones. There are DoCoMo phones everywhere - which, until recently, were everything but iPhones. Samsung, LG, plenty of Japanese makes. There are all kinds of phones in people's hands on the trains: some pretty nice smartphones, lots of Samsung-y creaky plastic models, and still a fair showing of old non-smart flip-phones (many sharp-looking, some clunky).
Plus, of course, lots of iPhones. Really, no contrived cultural explanations are needed to explain the iPhone's success here in Japan. It's a good product with a great ecosystem, backed by reliable service and successful marketing by Softbank (and later au and DoCoMo), in a market affluent enough to look beyond the cheapest price tags. That explains it.
Have a look at http://bit.ly/188oM2W if you are buying a 5 or 5s some really good prices, also if you are buying I suggest you look at all the accessories available, there are genius inventions to enhance what is already a great phone....
I didn't say that they didn't copy. They absolutely did, the charger, the packaging, amongst others, and do you honestly believe that someone bought a SGS 3 because the charger and packaging is like Apple's? Furthermore that's not the point I'm arguing. I believe that Samsung's success in the last 2 years or so has not been because they copied Apple but more so because of how they're different.
To your point: While Samsung has differentiated their physical product from Apple's after slavishly copying it in the beginning, Their UI still includes a lot of Apple's patented features... so they are still copying Apple where it counts.
Thank you, Daniel Dilger for your remembering and archiving and strategically reproducing old articles that highlight the folly and deception that so many "hit-whore journalists" inaccurately throw out as "factual reports" over time that so often prove to be deceptive, grossly inaccurate, and frequently even invented or dishonest. You manage to expose so many blatantly inaccurate stories and pundits over many, many years. (So many of them deserve to have their careers ruined. And the same goes for a lot of the financial analysts fraternity as well!). Thank you SO much for your great international research and well-written reporting which so aids cleaning up the tech press and serves to try to keep them honest! With respect to THAT mission, YOU and writers like Philip Elmer-Dewitt will NEVER be out of work, unfortunately.
Comments
Believing that their success is solely based on them copying Apple is what's foolish. Yes they fooled some people into buying the SGS 2 but they didn't fool anyone into buying a SGS 3 because they thought it was a iPhone. I did not know a single person with a SGS 2 but I know many with the SGS 3 and some were previous iPhone owners and when I ask why they switched the answer was never "because it's so much like the iPhone" it was "because it's different from the iPhone"
Totally agree. Japanese people are totally classy! High fashion lovers, good taste, hard workers. I am a greek, i have nothing to do with Japan, but i love and appreciate this country's spirit!
Believing that their success is solely based on them copying Apple is what's foolish. Yes they fooled some people into buying the SGS 2 but they didn't fool anyone into buying a SGS 3 because they thought it was a iPhone. I did not know a single person with a SGS 2 but I know many with the SGS 3 and some were previous iPhone owners and when I ask why they switched the answer was never "because it's so much like the iPhone" it was "because it's different from the iPhone"
Samsung’s copycat marketing and IP appropriation created in impression that Samsung phones were equivalent to Apple’s iPhone. Once you do that, it’s easy to introduce some original gimmicks and make arbitrary changes and then pretend that you earned your own success. Just ask Microsoft.
That said, there is no real market data showing that iPhone users migrated to Samsung devices in any significant numbers. The reality is that Symbian/WiMo/Palm users and lots of feature phone and new users began buying (or getting for free) Samsung phones because Samsung heavily marketed its products as being "pretty much an iPhone" to a generation of new users.
It wasn’t Android attracting them, and it wasn’t Samsung’s UI layers or other features, all of which have been copied by other companies that are not successful. Samsung stood out from the Android offerings because it was created and marketed as an Android-based iPhone clone.
Anyone can cite anecdotes about what their friends think, but that doesn’t mean much because anyone can say anything in insignificant numbers.
On this point I disagree, before the SGS 3 Samsung phones were not the Android device of choice, Motorola and HTC were, and never once did I see Samsung advertise any of their devices as "pretty much like an iPhone", and if you have a link of proof I'd like to see it.
Thank you, Daniel Dilger for your remembering and archiving and strategically reproducing old articles that highlight the folly and deception that so many "hit-whore journalists" inaccurately throw out as "factual reports" over time that so often prove to be deceptive, grossly inaccurate, and frequently even invented or dishonest.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
Not the point. Chen is the tool ( one of many) feeding a mass of publishing whores and their chase for advert $ driven by a negative news slant that pervades the media.
On the other hand, who give a rat's ass what Chen wrote about the iPhone some 5 years ago? That's about a half-century in gadget years.
It’s not an example of a mistake, it’s an example of setting out to write a particular story, interviewing sources that tell you that you are wrong and provide conflicting information, and then going ahead with a story you know is wrong, embellished with false quotations that say somebody in another country is saying what you’d have liked them to say.
Seeing that every openly presented gives you some insight into how blog-journalism works. Ignoring it as old history means you get to repeat it in ignorance of how the game is played.
If you don’t give a "rat’s ass" about facts or realty, there are plenty of sites crafting bullshit you can peruse in order to remain falsely informed.
On this point I disagree, before the SGS 3 Samsung phones were not the Android device of choice, Motorola and HTC were, and never once did I see Samsung advertise any of their devices as "pretty much like an iPhone", and if you have a link of proof I'd like to see it.
Why don’t you just go Google "Samsung packaging" and look at pictures yourself? I don’t think you need to be spoon fed anything.
I didn't say that they didn't copy. They absolutely did, the charger, the packaging, amongst others, and do you honestly believe that someone bought a SGS 3 because the charger and packaging is like Apple's? Furthermore that's not the point I'm arguing. I believe that Samsung's success in the last 2 years or so has not been because they copied Apple but more so because of how they're different.
I have been living in Japan since 2005 and I remember the debut of the iPhone 3G here. It was a dud. For all the reasons mentioned in the cited WSJ and Wired articles. Japanese really liked and used features like NFC, TV tuners, Japanese SMS/MMS, carrier based web browsing and Japanese cell phone games. I believe this is why Softbank, the exclusive carrier at that time, stopped charging for the base model iPhone after just several months of its debut in 2008. Softbank has continued to offer free iPhones (the latest model or in the case of the 5c, free phone plus an extra $50 or so) to this day, and the other two iPhone carriers in Japan have followed the same pricing scheme.
However, the Japanese may have preferred their old cell phones, but now they have fallen in love with the iPhone and other smartphones. The features they wanted in their phones have been replaced with usable or superior alternatives. NFC is replaced with IC embedded cards, over the air TV with youtube, messaging with app based messaging (Line), carrier based web with the Internet, and favorite cell phone games are ported to the app store. In addition, Japanese used to pay a lot for premium services like GPS, videos and games via monthly subscription to the carrier. Now they can get them free or through a one time app purchase and use them without additional cost, since most people have flat-rate unlimited (throttled after 7GB) data plans for about $65 a month. So yes, Japanese love the iPhone today, but I don't think they did when it debuted.
I have been living in Japan since 2005 and I remember the debut of the iPhone 3G here. It was a dud. For all the reasons mentioned in the cited WSJ and Wired articles. Japanese really liked and used features like NFC, TV tuners, Japanese SMS/MMS, carrier based web browsing and Japanese cell phone games. I believe this is why Softbank, the exclusive carrier at that time, stopped charging for the base model iPhone after just several months of its debut in 2008. Softbank has continued to offer free iPhones (the latest model or in the case of the 5c, free phone plus an extra $50 or so) to this day, and the other two iPhone carriers in Japan have followed the same pricing scheme.
However, the Japanese may have preferred their old cell phones, but now they have fallen in love with the iPhone and other smartphones. The features they wanted in their phones have been replaced with usable or superior alternatives. NFC is replaced with IC embedded cards, over the air TV with youtube, messaging with app based messaging (Line), carrier based web with the Internet, and favorite cell phone games are ported to the app store. In addition, Japanese used to pay a lot for premium services like GPS, videos and games via monthly subscription to the carrier. Now they can get them free or through a one time app purchase and use them without additional cost, since most people have flat-rate unlimited (throttled after 7GB) data plans for about $65 a month. So yes, Japanese love the iPhone today, but I don't think they did when it debuted.
Meanwhile in Australia, I got my iPhone 3G free on a 24 month plan because that's the way we (used) to do things over here.
There was nothing unusual about Softbank adopting such a model.
Now we follow a semi-American model with handset payments added over the life of the contract for a lot of phones with only the cheaper ones for free.
It seems to me it was liked as well as a foreign CE could be liked from the start.
This is from March 2009, which is within the first year of the iPhone being launched in Japan. "All that's clear is that while the iPhone might not be a strong player in Japan's mobile culture – and with no built-in TV, no multimedia messaging it's not a surprise - it seems that plenty of Japanese people like it well enough. Not as exciting, but probably a bit more realistic."
Good news piece. And thanks, DED, for bringing up Brian X Chen and his invented iPhone hit piece. If he had simply made an honest mistake in his research, correcting it as soon as the error was found, that would have been cool; forgive and forget, right? But he dishonestly made stuff up. He lied and passed it off as news, irking misquoted bloggers in Japan and causing WIRED to issue an apology. Yet amazingly, I see his name popping up here and there as a quoted "news" source again, even in Mac-related sites. Glad to see you put out this reminder of why Brian X Chen is a name to mistrust.
But on to a comment:
Quote:
This confirms my belief that Japanese people value honor, craftsmanship, and beauty... I've never seen a Japanese person sport an ugly 6 inch plastic Samdung POS.
Er, smart shoppers anywhere value honor, craftsmanship, and beauty. Nothing "Japanese people" about it. And here in Tokyo, there are plenty of people with big Samsung or similar phones. There are DoCoMo phones everywhere - which, until recently, were everything but iPhones. Samsung, LG, plenty of Japanese makes. There are all kinds of phones in people's hands on the trains: some pretty nice smartphones, lots of Samsung-y creaky plastic models, and still a fair showing of old non-smart flip-phones (many sharp-looking, some clunky).
Plus, of course, lots of iPhones. Really, no contrived cultural explanations are needed to explain the iPhone's success here in Japan. It's a good product with a great ecosystem, backed by reliable service and successful marketing by Softbank (and later au and DoCoMo), in a market affluent enough to look beyond the cheapest price tags. That explains it.
I believe a few stood out in the latest typhoon to return Samsung not-so-smart watches....
To your point: While Samsung has differentiated their physical product from Apple's after slavishly copying it in the beginning, Their UI still includes a lot of Apple's patented features... so they are still copying Apple where it counts.
Fixed that for you...
Hear! Hear!