Samsung trumps Nokia with first Windows Phone 8 phone unveiling

“Samsung Electronics became the first handset maker to announce a smartphone using Microsoft’s latest mobile software, making its surprise, hurried announcement just days before the highly anticipated launch of Nokia’s version,” Tarmo Virki and Miyoung Kim report for Reuters. “The brief announcement on Wednesday at a Berlin electronics show comes amid expectations that smartphone makers may turn increasingly to Windows devices after a U.S. jury decided many of Samsung’s Google Android-based phones infringed Apple Inc patents.”

“Nokia, the ailing Finnish mobile firm, once the world’s leading producer of phones but now struggling to reverse losses, is due to unveil its new Lumia line of smartphones using Windows Phone 8 in New York on Sept. 5,” Virki and Kim report. “Samsung’s new phone called ATIV S – tacked onto the end of a long news conference in Berlin that focused on other products – may elevate expectations for the Lumia. Samsung’s ATIV S Windows phone sports a high-end 4.8-inch display, Corning “Gorilla” glass, and an 8-megapixel rear camera and 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera, Microsoft posted on its official blog on Wednesday.”

“Samsung’s Windows-based smartphone, introduced on Wednesday, marks the first in a ‘big lineup of new hardware’ from the South Korean company based on Microsoft’s software, Microsoft executive Ben Rudolph said in a blog posting,” Virki and Kim report. “Samsung said the ATIV phone would hit stores in the October-November period but did not give an exact start date. On Wednesday, the Korean corporation also showed off a slew of tablets using Windows 8 software and the second generation of its popular Google Android-based Galaxy Note phone-cum-tablet ‘phablet’ in downtown Berlin… Apple did not include the Note and other newly unveiled Samsung products in its original lawsuit. But the company and its lawyers are expected by many legal experts to try and use last week’s legal victory to go after future gadgets, especially because the jury found infringing features in Samsung phones such as pinch-and-zoom and bounce-back — common in Android.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Windows Phone will be popular. Over time, it’ll eat the lunch of the increasingly fragmented, increasingly insecure, and increasingly costly Android (losing patent infringement lawsuits and dropping features/paying royalties to multiple IP owners will do that to you).

The not-iPhone world will begin to dump Android and move to Microsoft’s mobile OS offering because it will eventually cost less, work better, and come with far fewer legal issues. In the iPhone wannabe market, it’s already happening (Nokia, for example). We expect the same to happen in the iPad wannabe market, too [with Windows 8/RT]. Google and Microsoft will long battle each other for the non-Apple markets and that’s a much better scenario for everyone than having a single ripoff artist flood the market with fragmented, insecure, beta-esque, mediocre-at-best products. Google’s attempt to be the next Microsoft is doomed.

This, of course, will also impact Google’s search business. Apple’s Siri will increasingly deliver info to users sans Google and Microsoft will, naturally, use Bing for their search. As we’ve said many times in the past: “Google will rue the day they got greedy by deciding to try to work against Apple instead of with them.”

The bottom line: We’d rather see a company trying unique ideas, even if – shockingly – it’s Microsoft, than the wholesale theft of Apple innovations that we’ve been seeing for over four years now. Don’t steal IP. Even worse, don’t steal IP and “claim to be innovators.” We have no problem with any companies that attempt to compete with Apple using their own unique ideas and strategies. – MacDailyNews Take, October 27, 2011