Hacker News Reader

Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

The story going around is this:

a) Samsung spent a ton of money and research in building foldable OLED screens.

b) This technology is allegedly stolen by a supplier and sold to BOE Display: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-...

c) Huawei uses the foldable BOE Display technology in its Mate X smartphone and is on track to be the first to release it.

d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro.

e) In addition Samsung goes into lock down as it fears there might be more leaks to other companies.

f) Combination of d) and e) means that there is less real world testing of the device than for other phones. And hence how we got to this point.

View on HN

Interesting.

>>d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro.

Doesn't sound silly at all. I have a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S and it's an amazingly good phone for the price (replaced my Google Pixel 2, which I liked enough). I'll absolutely buy a Chinese phone to replace this phone when it's time in a few years, or at least look into it. Other people constantly ask about the phone (has a striking reflective ceramic back) and haven't heard of Chinese phones, but are considering alternatives in droves due to the insane prices of flagships by Apple and Samsung.

You can save a decent amount of money buying phones from brands that don't pay for their own R&D.

Why do they still sell on US soil? If they'd violated some patent, couldn't the original author get them banned?

They could have just licensed the patents?

Patent litigation is complex and expensive. Also, often a lot of innovations are still patent pending due to the time it takes to get them registered.

Can't you send some preliminary request based on pending patent? Also, Huawei and Xiaomu have been getting stronger in US market for years now.

Expensive? We are talking about $1T company here. I can't imagine they are unable to afford litigation in their core business space.

Basically, until somebody shows they violated some patent(s), these claimes about stolen tech are just a smere campaign. I don't understand why Huawei won't sue for it.

I guess that's why there aren't too many Chinese made phones sold in the US.

Huawei is one of the largest R&D spenders in the world. Perhaps time to stop regurgitating nonsense?

Lot of assumptions baked in here, but the major Chinese manufacturers are not the only ones doing that by a long shot, if that's your complaint.

Additionally, the amount of cash Apple has on hand doesn't strike me as people plunging a major amount of their cash reserves into R&D. Much the opposite, actually.

The're expanding R&D very rapidly, quadrupling their spend on it over the last 6 years. For a mature company with an already well established product development operation that's pretty astounding. It's just that they became so immensely profitable so fast, their profits in absolute numbers still dwarf it.

It doesn't take much R&D to assemble a Qualcomm chipset, an LG display panel, a Sony imaging sensor and some Samsung memory into a phone, nor does it require any kind of reverse-engineering or industrial espionage. The latest flagship phones might use semi-custom components, but midrange handsets are just commodity parts.

And tons of annoying ads.

not only that but... people trust chinese phones with a chinese OS? i mean, if they steal R&D, what are the chances they are also stealing your data?

>> people trust chinese phones with a chinese OS?

No, wiping and installing stock Android is not that difficult, which is what I've done. Also, you drastically overestimate how interested Chinese manufacturers are in additional data [0] of random Americans.

[0]: Considering that all smartphone companies steal your data in some form, I doubt Xiaomi is stealing significantly more, really.

I meant the copiers generally spend less (probably much less than Samsung) on building a brand. Again more value for your money.

I own a Pocophone F1, made by Xiaomi. It supposedly has one of the better UIs by default, but I found it pretty insufferable.

Then again: The terrible software (with some ads) probably again subsidizes the device's price. No joke, the device with absolutely high-end specs cost me about 300€.

The bootloader unlocking process is an insult (you have to have a Xiaomi account, verify your e-mail address, link it to your device, install their windows-only software, then wait 3 days [most of those steps took me multiple reboots to get figured out correctly]), but after that it is absolutely smooth to install the Android distribution of your choice - and there's a lot of it.

I made sure not to do any banking on it before replacing the software, but afterwards it's probably more trustworthy than stock software of any non-chinese vendor.

Of course if we're talking about stock chinese software ..... yeah, I wouldn't trust that, even on their 'global' versions, that aren't government guaranteed to spy on their users.

> Doesn't sound silly at all

I have to agree. Here in the UK, Huawei regularly advertise on TV now (often just after a Samsung ad!), and the name "Xiaomi" is becoming more recognised.

Aside from brand recognition, they make some great devices that are cheaper than those from Samsung and Apple.

When it comes time to replace my S7, I'll certainly be looking seriously at Huawei and Xiaomi.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/briefing/2018...

Huawei makes a lot of the equipment for installations like this.

How do you reconcile that?

Not everybody disagrees with that, and even if they do they may not care enough not to buy Huawei equipment.

Plenty of American companies facilitate surveillance and censorship.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424584/new-evidence-that-...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/surveillance-and-censorship-ins...

Of course. There's also the famous case of IBM supplying the Nazi party.

How does this address Huawei ...?

The very site you linked to (Google's butchering of the web via AMP) supported Project Maven explicitly and then implicitly by laundering their work through a contractor. Save your outrage.

Huawei is a huge organisation, so it's fair to say that not everyone who works there is involved in mass surveillance, and not everyone is hell-bent on creating an Orwellian nightmare.

Furthermore, many western companies (e.g. Cisco) have been called out for being involved with "dodgy" things like mass surveillance in countries in the Middle East and Asia - but also in western countries too.

IMO it makes to sense to boycott Huawei any more than it makes sense to boycott Cisco.

And if you meant in a "red danger" sense, as opposed to just Huawei, then I think it's safe to say the west is well on its way down the slippery slope to mass surveillance and over-reaching powers - the press likes to make a big deal of how evil China is, but completely ignores what goes on at home.

"Other companies do bad things, too" is whataboutism and doesn't really address this one, though.

Re f), It's probably a culture thing. Samsung used to churn out >200 phone models per year. Want long term support and thorough testing? Non-existent.

Re b), It's commonly accepted by a lot of people in China, Taiwan that it's Samsung's tactics to maintain market domination.

If you believe the anecdotes, like this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4fnp86/why_does_ht...

Samsung cut the oled supply to Huawei when it threatened Samsung's mobile phone market share, the same reason why Samsung screwed HTC before.

The technology is bendable screens, that have been around in testing labs for years. LG released a folding tv last year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com