Hasta La Gadget!

Abrams has not conceded the tight and potentially historic Georgia governor’s race.

Let me just say that I love the idea of a folding phone/tablet device. I was a Courier fanboy when Microsoft floated that intriguing but abortive concept device, and I’m all for unique form factors and things that bend. But Samsung’s first real shot at a folding device is inexplicable and probably dead on arrival. I’d like to congratulate the company for trying something new, but this one needed a little more time in the oven.

I haven’t used it, of course, so this is just my uninformed opinion (provided for your edification). But this device is really weird, and not in a good way. It’s a really thick phone with big bezels around a small screen that opens up into a small tablet. No one wants that!

Think about it. Why do you want a big screen?

If it’s for media, like most people, consider that nearly all that media is widescreen now, either horizontal (YouTube and Netflix) or vertical (Instagram and Facebook). You can switch between these views at will extremely easily. Now consider that because of basic geometry, the “big” screen inside this device will likely not be able to show that media much, if any, larger than the screen on the front!

(Well, in this device’s case, maybe a little, but only because that front display’s bezel really is huge. Why do you think they turned the lights off? Look where the notification bar is!)

It’s like putting two of the tall screens next to each other. You end up with one twice as wide, but that’s pretty much what you get if you put the phone on its side. All you gain with the big screen is a whole lot of letterboxing or windowboxing. Oh, and probably about three quarters of an inch of thickness and half a pound of weight. This thing is going to be a beast.

Power users may also want a big screen for productivity: email and document handling and such is great on a big device like a Galaxy Note. Here then is opportunity for a folding tablet to excel (so to speak). You can just plain fit more words and charts and controls on there. Great! But if the phone is geared toward power users, why even have the small screen on the front anyway if any time that user wants to engage with the phone they will “open” it up? For quick responses or dismissing notifications, maybe, but who would really want that? That experience will always be inferior to the one the entire device is designed around.

I would welcome a phone that was only a book-style big internal screen, and I don’t think it would be a bother to flip it open when you want to use it. Lots of people with giant phones keep book-like covers on their devices anyway! It would be great to be able to use those square inches for the display rather than credit card slots or something.

The Courier had tons of great ideas on how to use two screens.

There are also creative ways to use the screen: left and right halves are different apps; top half is compose and bottom is keyboard; left half is inbox and right half is content; top half is media and bottom is controls and comments. Those sprang to mind faster than I could type them.

On the other hand, I can’t think of any way that a “front” display could meaningfully interact with or enhance a secondary (or is it primary?) display that will never be simultaneously visible. Presumably you’ll use one or the other at any given time, meaning you literally can’t engage the entire capability of the device.

You know what would be cool? A device like this that also used the bezel display we’ve seen on existing Galaxy devices. How cool would it be to have your phone closed like a book, but with an always-on notification strip (or two!) on the lip, telling you battery, messages and so on? And maybe if you tapped once the device would automatically pop open physically! That would be amazing! And Samsung is absolutely the company that I’d say would make it.

Instead, they made this thing.

It’s disappointing to me not just because I don’t like the device as they’ve designed it, but because I think the inevitable failure of the phone will cool industry ambition regarding unique devices like it. That’s wrong, though! People want cool new things. But they also want them to make sense.

I’m looking forward to how this technology plays out, and I fully expect to own a folding phone some time in the next few years. But this first device seems to me like a major misstep, and one that will set back that flexible future rather than advance it.

Viv Labs CEO Dag Kittlaus

As Samsung get closer to its self-imposed 2020 deadline for having ALL of its devices use Bixby’s AI, the company is working hard to enlist the help of developers during its Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) in San Francisco.

Eui-Suk Chung, Samsung executive vice president and head of software and AI, was on-stage to remind developers that Samsung is committed to an open Bixby ecosystem.

Samsung will invest $22B in addition to creating seven AI development centers around the world and hiring an additional 1000 AI experts. He also announced the Bixby Marketplace, without elaborating further, for now – but that’s key because it’s how revenues will flow back to developers.

Some of the development tools are created by Viv Labs, which was acquired by Samsung for about $215M in February 2017. Viv Labs CEO Dag Kittlaus demonstrated new tools, the same ones that the company is using internally he says, and confirmed that these would be made available to all developers.

“No tradeoffs,” “You will be using the exact same tools we use,” “you will have full access to every deep set of functionality we use to build Bixby today,” said Dag Kittlaus. This is important to developers because not having the same tools and feature set could be a considerable disadvantage as Samsung itself is a developer.

Also, less energy could be spent by Samsung to create and maintain multiple APIs and tools. In both instances, Samsung’s message to developers is that they’re all in it together.

Samsung’s SDK (software development kit) will also help developers by generating boiler-plate code that can handle a broad range of known use cases. The demonstration showed how it was possible to quickly build a room reservation system and test it within the Samsung integrated development environment (IDE). Ideally, the time saved by developers can be reallocated to more valuable code.

Eui-Suk Chung, Samsung executive vice president and head of software and AI

It’s too early to know if developers will embrace Samsung’s proposition, but the reaction on the ground seemed very positive. In the end, the real metric for success is the number of successful/useful apps build for Bixby.

For Samsung, creating a healthy ecosystem around Bixby is extremely important because it could open the door to new revenue streams as the Bixby interface could open new opportunities with search, shopping, music and much more if executed successfully.

From a smartphone perspective, Samsung also needs a compelling ecosystem to fend off device makers who don’t need to make money on the hardware, such as Xiaomi, which makes money on the web services it offers. At the same time, Samsung Mobile needs to content with OEMs who don’t mind thin margins such as Oppo/OnePlus or those who will not hold back on component prices such as Huawei.

Although the smart assistant market has been buzzing rather intensely within the industry, less than 5% of the U.S population has interacted with Bixby, which places Samsung behind Apple, Google or Amazon.

Samsung is counting on the Galaxy Home smart speaker to gain share. Revealed during the Galaxy Note 9 event, this smart speaker boasts a superb design and potentially much higher sound quality than its competitors. We’ll just have to wait and see when we can take it for a spin to confirm.

One thing is sure: from Samsung’s point of view, any Samsung device could be a Bixby device, and given the number of electronics the company ships yearly, there is a tremendous untapped opportunity to gain share, and developers are an essential piece of the puzzle.

Samsung Opens Bixby To 3rd Party Developers , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Abrams has not conceded the tight and potentially historic Georgia governor’s race.

Dutch police say they have “decrypted more than 258,000 messages” sent using an expensive chat service, Ars Technica reported on Wednesday, citing a National Police Corps statement that claimed authorities in the Netherlands have achieved a “breakthrough in the interception and decryption of encrypted communication…

Read more…