Samsung Unveils Two Windows Phone 8 Devices, “Odyssey” and “Marco”

 South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung is one of the handset vendors set to launch Windows Phone 8 devices when the new platform becomes available, and it seems that the company has at least two such smartphones ready. As part of an ongoing lawsuit with Apple, Samsung brought as evidence said two Windows Phone 8 smartphones, codenamed "Odyssey" and "Marco."According to the company, both these smartphones will come to the market with dual-core application processors inside. To be more precise, the documents that Samsung showed to the court unveiled that these handsets are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8960 dual-core 1.5GHz chip, The Verge reports. This is the same SoC that Microsoft has been previously said to have been using for testing the upcoming platform release, meaning that Samsung’s devices will be fully optimized for Windows Phone 8. 

Additionally, the aforementioned documents unveiled that both phones will pack support for LTE and HSPA+ 21Mbps connectivity. Samsung Odyssey will sport a 4.65-inch HD sAMOLED touchscreen display, while featuring an 8-megapixel photo snapper on the back, and a 2MP camera on the front. 

The handset will also become available with NFC (Near Field Communication) capabilities, which means that it will provide users with support for Wallet Hub and Tap + Send features. 

Codenamed Marco, the second Samsung Windows Phone 8 handset will pack a 4-inch WVGA sAMOLED display, along with a 5-megapixel camera on the back, and a 2MP camera on the front. 

Said documents also show that Samsung was planning to make these two available for purchase sometime in the fourth quarter of the year, in line with previous rumors on Windows Phone 8’s launch. 

When released, Windows Phone 8 will be loaded on devices coming from other handset vendors as well, including Nokia, which is considered to be Microsoft’s primary partner on this. 

The first Windows Phone 8 smartphones might become official in September, yet market availability is expected to occur only in October or November.

Apple - Samsung patent design battle ...

The Apple vs. Samsung patent war just scooped in a whole boatload of crazy. 
A U.K. judge has told Apple it must publicize a notice on both its U.K. website and in British newspapers stating that it had lost a case against Samsung in which the rival tablet maker did not infringe the iPad's design in its range of Galaxy products

. If the latest report on the lawsuit proceedings on Bloomberg is the one to go by, then Apple has been ordered by Judge Colin Birss to publish a notice on its U.K. website and in British newspapers, informing consumers to the effect that the Galaxy Tab's design has not been copied from the iPad. Essentially, the notice that Apple has been asked to publish should highlight the court's July 9 decision, wherein it affirmed that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets do not infringe upon Apple’s patented designs. The report further reveals that, "The order means Apple will have to publish “an advertisement” for Samsung, Richard Hacon, a lawyer for Cupertino, California-based Apple, told the court. “No company likes to refer to a rival on its website.”"
The notice, which should explain the outcome of a U.K. court hearing on July 9, should be published to make it clear that Samsung did not break U.K. law, despite varied results in more than a dozen separate patent cases that stretch across four different continents.



To add insult to injury, Apple must leave the notice on its website for up to six months from its first publication date, Judge Colin Birss said today, following on from his final judgment nearly two weeks ago.


While the order was not mentioned in Birss' judgment, the matter was discussed in court afterwards. 
But Birss denied Samsung's attempt to force Apple to stop saying that the Galaxy tablet had infringed its design rights, reports Bloomberg, claiming Apple was "entitled to their opinion" that the judgment handed down was not correct. 


One of the key elements to the ongoing patent cases is that Samsung "slavishly" copied the design of the iPad following its release. Samsung has always maintained that it had not, despite suffering temporary sales injunctions elsewhere in the world.

The U.K. High Court in London previously ruled that Samsung tablets were not as "cool" as Apple's iPad and therefore did not infringe Apple's iPad patents. Samsung walked away able to sell its Galaxy tablets in British stores -- despite an embarrassing blow to the reputation of its products, and Apple came out with a bloodied nose and no sales injunction in hand, something it had sought in court.


 The "advertisement" for Samsung is an attempt by the court to help the Korea-based technology giant to recoup much of its bad publicity brought by Apple in Britain. But a lawyer representing Cupertino said it would be "prejudicial" to Apple to issue such a statement, which even under quirky British law is a somewhat unusual punishment to dish out.

Google shoots itself in the foot in mobile

I wish I knew the inside story on Google's recent confrontation with the Chinese government. At first Google's announcement looked like a principled, well thought-out stand in a long behind-the-scenes dispute (link). But as more details have emerged, it has started to look as if Google didn't think through the consequences outside of its core search business. In the mobile market, those consequences could be significant. Here's why...

Google's Android OS has been gaining enormous support among mobile operators and handset vendors because it was viewed as the most feasible alternative to total domination by Apple. All of the other OS options had nasty baggage -- Microsoft was viewed as both controlling and unable to create demand, Symbian was seen as Nokia's pet, and the other flavors of Linux were all below critical mass.

In contrast, Google seemed technically competent, vendor-neutral, and capable of attracting users. (By the way, it says something about Apple's growing power in the mobile industry that a company as controlling as Google was seen as the safe partner; it's kind of like cozying up to a kodiak bear to escape a tiger.)

Google's dispute in China damages its image as a safe partner. A phone announcement in China involving Motorola, Samsung, and China Unicom has now been delayed because of the dispute, and it's not clear when it will be rescheduled. The public story on the delay is that Google demanded it (link), but I'm not sure I believe that. China Unicom is basically owned by the Chinese government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the delay was forced by them as a way to punish Google.

Either way, picture how this must feel to Motorola and Samsung. They have nothing to do with the dispute, but now they're trapped between Google and the Chinese government. That wouldn't be a big deal if we were talking about, say, the Cambodian phone market (no offense, Cambodia), but Samsung and Motorola both view China as a critical growth market. They can't afford to be pushed out of it.

Even aside from the political fears, real economic damage has already been done. Google's actions have delayed the imminent release of some major licensees' devices. Unless you have worked in a handset company, it's hard to understand how utterly unacceptable that is to them. Product launches are planned many months in advance, and are coordinated down to the day. Samsung and Motorola both have phone inventory waiting to be sold. There's cash tied up in that inventory, salespeople can't make their quotas, advertising was probably planned that now has to be rescheduled at additional cost, and so on. Plus, both companies now lose ground to competitors selling other devices. Most phones have a short lifetime anyway, so sales lost now probably can't be made up later. If you were a Motorola employee and you caused that sort of disruption, you'd probably get fired. But Motorola can't fire its OS supplier.

At least not immediately.

Because of problems like this, Google is now talking hopefully about retaining its business unit in China even if it closes down its search engine there (link). That raises the question of why Google threatened to completely pull out of China in the first place. If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd view this flip-flop as a sign of vulnerability, and would be tempted to systematically go after targets like Android in an effort to put more pressure on Google. But for the moment the government appears to be moving cautiously, perhaps to avoid creating sympathy for Google.

Maybe in a week Google and the Chinese government will have come up with a neat, face-saving resolution to the whole problem. But even in that best-case scenario, Google's image as a supplier to the mobile industry has been damaged. The company has shown that its search business is more important to it (and more top-of-mind) than its mobile OS. Mobile operators outside of China won't care about this, but the handset vendors will. Some of them are based in China, and almost all manufacture there and sell into that market. Who's to say that Google won't end up in another dispute in China in another year? Add in Google's decision to start making its own phones in competition with licensees, and it now looks like a much less reliable OS supplier than it was six months ago.

To a Chinese phone company, relying on Android must now feel extremely uncomfortable. I bet Samsung went ballistic in private; it is completely intolerant of a supplier who's interested in anything other than making Samsung rich. I'd expect Samsung to put more emphasis on its other OS options in the future. And somewhere at Motorola, a harried executive is probably rolling his or her eyes and starting work on evaluating alternative smartphone operating systems, yet again.

The question is what alternative they'd choose. There's speculation that the LiMO alliance may be strengthened (link), and I could picture Chinese officials eventually trying to create a home-grown OS standard, just as they did in 3G (link). But the most straightforward alternative is Symbian, and I suspect it may get a quiet second look in many places -- although for the handset companies, that would feel like fleeing a tiger and a bear in order to hug an anaconda.

Four questions about the Microsoft-Nokia alliance

The Microsoft-Nokia alliance turned out to be a lot more interesting than the pre-announcement rumors made it out to be. Rather than just a bundling deal for mobile Office, the press release says they'll also be co-developing "a range of new user experiences" for Nokia phones, aimed at enterprises. Those will include mobile Office, enterprise IM and conferencing, access to portals built on SharePoint, and device management.

Of those items, the IM and conferencing ideas sound the most promising to me. Office, as I explained in my last post, is not much of a purchase-driver on mobile phones. And I think Microsoft would have needed to provide Nokia compatibility in its mobile portal and device management products anyway.

I understand the logic behind the alliance. Nokia has never been able to get much traction for its e-series business phones, and Microsoft hasn't been able to kick RIM out of enterprise. So if they get together, maybe they can make progress. But it's easy to make a sweeping corporate alliance announcement, and very hard to make it actually work, especially when the partners are as big and high-ego as Microsoft and Nokia. This alliance will live or die based on execution, and on a lot of details that we don't know about yet.

Here are four questions I'd love to see answered:


What specifically are those "new user experiences"?

If Nokia and Microsoft can come up with some truly useful functionality that RIM can't copy, they might be able to win share. But the emphasis in the press release on enterprise mobility worries me. The core users for RIM are communication-hungry professionals. If you want to eat away at RIM's base, you need to excite those communicator users, and I'm not sure if either company has the right ideas to do that. As Microsoft has already proven, pleasing IT managers won't drive a ton of mobile phone purchases.


Will Microsoft really follow through?

Microsoft has been hinting for the last decade that it was were willing to decouple mobile Office from the operating system, but they never had the courage to follow through. Now they have announced something that sounds pretty definitive, but the real test will be whether they put their best engineers on the Nokia products. If Microsoft assigns its C players to the alliance, or tries to make its Nokia products inferior to their Windows Mobile versions, the alliance won't go anywhere interesting.


What does this do to Microsoft's relationships with other handset companies?

Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Samsung. Actually, imagine that for several moments. You aren't exclusive with Microsoft, but you've done a lot of phones with Windows Mobile on them. Now all of a sudden Microsoft makes a deal with a company that you think of as the Antichrist.

How do you feel about that?

I can tell you that Samsung is not the most trusting and nurturing company to do business with even in the best of times. So I think you make two phone calls. The first is to Steve Ballmer, asking very pointedly if you can get the same software as Nokia, on the same terms, at the same time. If you don't like the answer to that question, your next call is to Google, regarding increasing your range of Android phones.

Maybe the reality is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Mobile and doesn't care what Samsung does. But that itself would be interesting news.

I would love to know how those phone calls went today.


What does RIM do about this?

It has been putting a lot of effort into Apple-competitive features like multimedia and a software store. Does it have enough bandwidth to also fight Nokia-Microsoft? What happens to its core business if Microsoft and Nokia do come up with some cool functions that RIM doesn't have? Are there any partners that could be a counterweight to Microsoft and Nokia? If I'm working at RIM, I start to think about alliances with companies like Oracle and SAP. And I wonder if Google is interested in doing some enterprise work together.