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Samsung's strategy for keeping up with Apple is to be mean
Valve Accidentally Launched Its Twitch Competitor Steam.tv
OnePlus 6T will launch with T-Mobile, its first US carrier partner

Samsung's strategy for keeping up with Apple is to be mean

Posted: 18 Aug 2018 04:25 AM PDT

Does being petty pay off?

Next week, Samsung’s newest smartphone, the Galaxy Note 9, will hit stores. It’s a wonderful, giant phone that really has no rivals at that size. It follows Samsung’s Galaxy S9, another great phone, which it released in March.

But sales of the S9 have reportedly been weak, accounting for a slowdown in the company’s earnings. Analysts have predicted it’ll be the worst-selling Galaxy phone in six years, according to The Verge.

Samsung is still the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the world by a wide margin, according to the market-research firm IDC. But Apple, its longtime rival in the smartphone wars, recently fell to third place in worldwide market share, behind Huawei.

Regardless, when it comes to the way Samsung is marketing its new devices, it appears to be fixated on just bashing Apple.

Samsung launched a new advertising campaign earlier this year called “Ingenius,” clearly mocking the Genius Bars found at Apple stores. The ads focus on a dimwitted Apple employee who tows the company line on its products, and remains unaware of what other companies offer, as customers who seem to know a ton specifically about Samsung products pepper him with questions.

Samsung has for years run anti-Apple ads, including a historical look at a longtime Apple fan who finally realized Samsung phones might better suit his needs. The ad highlighted what Samsung phones could do that Apple’s couldn’t.

Its new ads, however, seem to just be making fun of people who work for Apple, rather than explaining why someone should buy a Note 9.

One has a customer asking why the Apple Pencil (its stylus for iPads) doesn’t work on the iPhone. Instead of asking why anyone would need that, it just shows the Apple employee dumbfounded:

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The other has a customer saying the Note 9 is powerful (which it is!) but not explaining what you can do with that power. Instead it just has the Apple employee again scrounging for retorts:

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It’s getting harder and harder to do innovative, interesting things in smartphone hardware. Just about every high-end phone released these days has a great display, a great camera, good battery life, and looks like a black rectangle. Some try to differentiate their devices with wacky gimmicks—like Motorola and all the things you can slap onto its phones, or Samsung with its built-in Note styluses. Others try to build communities around their hardware, like OnePlus.

But when that doesn’t work, the answer is apparently to attack competitors. The Note 9 and the S9 are both very good phones, as is the iPhone X. If Samsung is struggling to sell phones, perhaps it should be more worried about what its phones can do, not what its competitors—who happen to have recently become the US’s first trillion-dollar company, mainly by selling expensive phones—are up to.

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Valve Accidentally Launched Its Twitch Competitor Steam.tv

Posted: 18 Aug 2018 03:29 AM PDT

[Update] Steam.tv has been taken offline and, in a statement to CNET, a Valve representative said it was meant to be an internal test and was made publicly accessible by accident. "We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2's annual tournament," the company explained. "What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public," said the company."

[Original story] Valve, which runs digital game distribution platform Steam, has launched Steam.tv, a video streaming portal that could be direct competition to Twitch and YouTube. Steam.tv is currently showing Dota 2's The International, with no option to watch any other games or stream to the service yet. However, it's likely that both of these features will be introduced in the near future.

Once logged in, Steam.tv displays the new Steam Chat introduced recently and allows users to invite friends to join and view the video feed together. Although the site is currently a bit unstable, CNET has managed to explore some of the other functionality available. It reports that Steam.tv has built-in voice chat on Google Chrome, but this doesn't seem to work on Firefox or Edge.

At the time of writing, Valve hasn't publicly acknowledged the launch of Steam.tv, opting instead to quietly make it live. Given the size of Steam's user base and the fact that Steam is currently the leading digital game storefront, it makes sense that Valve would want to give Steam users a place to stream games or watch others do so. Although Twitch and YouTube are the go to services for game streaming, challengers have started to appear, most notably Microsoft's Mixer service and now Steam.tv.

Steam is also facing competition when it comes to the sale of games, with Discord--already incredibly popular service for chatting while playing games--recently announcing it will start selling games, and even for some with an exclusivity period. Major publishers like Bethesda, meanwhile, are also starting to distance themselves from Valve's platform. Fallout 76 will be distributed through Bethesda's own service first, instead on Steam.

The recent Steam Chat launch introduced new grouping features, a Favorites tag, and also revealed more details on what friends doing. Friends will now automatically be grouped by game and by party, which makes it easier play with them. The dedicated friends menu will display specific details about what exactly friends are doing in a game too. Additionally, group chats can be pulled together much easier now. You can read more about the Steam Chat update here.

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OnePlus 6T will launch with T-Mobile, its first US carrier partner

Posted: 18 Aug 2018 04:07 AM PDT

OnePlus' next flagship phone will get a feature that's new to the company: the backing of a major US carrier.

T-Mobile will be the exclusive US carrier partner for the OnePlus 6T when it launches in October, according to people familiar with the launch plans. That includes a specific version of the OnePlus 6T optimized for T-Mobile's network, the people said.

The company, however, will still sell its standard global version that's unlocked and able to run on either AT&T or T-Mobile, as well as networks overseas. The price of the OnePlus 6T is tentatively set at $550, although that hasn't been finalized.

For the phone-savvy, OnePlus represents an alternative to the $1,000 super premium smartphones offered by Samsung (Galaxy Note 9) and Apple (iPhone X). Its rise in popularity coincides with the decline of older stalwarts like HTC and LG.

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The partnership underscores the progress that OnePlus has made in the US. The Chinese phone maker isn't a household name, but has long attracted diehard Android fans for its mix of high-end specs and affordable prices. Having a place at T-Mobile stores means it'll attract more mainstream awareness.

"Getting carrier shelf space is a prerequisite to volume sales in the US," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Global Data.

While the typical route for a phone maker hoping to break into the US market is to work with a carrier -- typically on cheap phones first -- OnePlus took a different route and has steadily built its own cult following here.

Other companies have tried and failed to go directly after consumers. OnePlus's growing success here as a Chinese company contrasts with some of its peers, including Huawei and ZTE, which have seen their efforts hobbled by government pressure. ZTE is just now clawing back from its near death sentence after settling with the Commerce Department in a deal pushed by President Trump.

T-Mobile could give OnePlus a shot in the arm by expanding its retail presence to physical locations (OnePlus was previously only sold here online). The company's CEO, Pete Lau, said in an interview with CNET in January that he would begin talking with the US carrier this year.

"If the right opportunity and right timing come along, we'll be very happy to experiment," Lau said through co-founder Carl Pei, who served as interpreter.

The odds were always going to be high that OnePlus landed at T-Mobile or AT&T, since its global unlocked phones are compatible with the two carriers. Because of the need for different wireless standards, OnePlus phones don't work on the Verizon or Sprint networks. And while OnePlus is part of the same group that owns phone brands Oppo and Vivo, it lacks the resources to commit to building specific phones for different carriers. Verizon's notoriously high standards of testing already made a OnePlus phone on its network an unlikely reality.

T-Mobile's version of the OnePlus 6T will be optimized for the carrier's network, including the new 600 megahertz band of spectrum being rolled out that promises better and faster coverage. T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray has often boasted about the improvement to the quality of the network thanks to the new swath of spectrum.

The only hiccup with the US launch could come from the testing required by T-Mobile to get certification on the network. OnePlus is still in the process of getting what's known as "technical approval" at the carrier, according to one person. Failure to get the approval could cause a delay with the carrier launch.

Also, presence in a US carrier store doesn't guarantee success, notes Lopez Research analyst Maribel Lopez. Just look at the Essential phone at Sprint. Sales rep often push the most popular phones for the quickest sales, which tend to be Apple and Samsung devices.

But OnePlus' younger, more technically savvy crowd, however, lines up well with T-Mobile's core demographic.

The story originally published on Aug. 17 at 5 a.m. PT.

Update, 8:04 a.m. PT: To include additional background.

Update, Aug. 18 at 4:07 a.m.: To include additional background.

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