Galaxy S III preorders approach 10 million | Hacker News Reader

Galaxy S III preorders approach 10 million

bgr.com

36 pointskemper47 comments

This phone is one of the most exciting things happening, at least for me: It has a barometer! Joining the ranks of the Galaxy Nexus, Note, and Moto Xoom. Except, I think the SGS3 is way more popular than any of those others (by a couple orders of magnitude in some cases).

I'm the developer of pressureNET, an open source Android project to build a live, global barometer network. The project has seen solid growth, but not on the scale that would allow for groundbreaking weather prediction. We get about 17,000 measurements per day, but I think I need something like 1,000,000.

Does anyone have ideas that could help me with marketing and growing the network with the release of this phone? I've been posting to Reddit, XDA, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, but I worry about spamming them and I think I have saturated my audience there.

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I'm anxious about missing out on all these new barometer users.

Given that a barometer is seemingly so rare on the market (and your app is probably one of the few set to take advantage of it) maybe you could talk to Samsung about a cross-promotional type deal? It could allow them to further differentiate and market their phone, and you'd get your data!

I've been thinking about contacting the manufacturers for a while, but the task is daunting. Does this kind of thing actually work? I'll definitely investigate this with the kind of response I've had here on HN, it sounds like it may almost be common. Thanks for the help!

Who cares? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Just contact them.

As someone else has pointed out, talk to Samsung. I don't know where you're based, but they have regional teams that do developer outreach. I've found them to be very helpful.

I'm in Montreal, and will definitely check out regional opportunities! What sort of help did they provide you with? I always imagined it would near impossible for a small, part-time dev to talk to a giant company like Samsung.

You might try touching base with Steve Kondik (@cyanogen; of Cyanogenmod fame) who now works for Samsung. You might briefly explain your project and see if he can get you in touch with the right person at Samsung/Google.

Maybe you can convince Samsung to install your app as part of the phone's app package...

This is bullshit, the "preorders" are from carriers not actual customers. Samsung could sell zero units and still claim to have 9 million preorders.

> Samsung Electronics Co has received some 9 million pre-orders for its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone from more than 100 global carriers, the Korea Economic Daily reported on Friday.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-samsung-idUSBRE...

The number of "news" sites just blindly reposting this as if it were actual customers is frankly disgusting.

What is your point exactly? I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders. They don't want a ton of inventory just sitting on their shelves. So the carriers expect to sell them and Samsung did sell them (doesn't matter who bought them).

The point is it doesn't matter how many units they sell to Best Buy, what matters is how many units they sell to consumers.

This happens all the time, we hear about X millions of units "shipped" only to find out months later that a small fraction of those actually made it into consumers hands.

Given the incredible popularity of the GS2 among the Android community, I'd say it's not unreasonable to think the GS3 will sell well.

No one is saying it won't sell well. They're saying that reporting carrier orders as "sales pre-orders" lacks an important detail. Thus, some are calling bullshit on the headline.

There might well be a term that says they can return unsold stock.

>>I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders.

The Android manufacturers cited deliveries to stores as sales for the first generation of pads too. That didn't exactly work out...

I remember reading on Reuters that Apple forces carriers to buy a minimum amount of iPhones now when they launch, or I would assume they won't give them the iPhone.

Also, maybe the carriers have done their research and are expecting to sell a lot of them.

carriers base their pre-orders off customer requests, they have been in the handset retailing/reselling business for long enough to understand customer demand and how many they will need on release day.

I know plenty of people hoping to pick one up on release date, quite a few of those are leaving apple too.

  Chipset 	Exynos 4212 Quad
  CPU 	        Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9
  GPU 	        Mali-400MP

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php

The Mali-400MP is quad-core (x2 from before) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos This seems feasible, with similar battery life, as they've shrunk the process to half the area: 45^2 vs 32^2.

Its performance per core is comparable the sgx543 of the iPhone/iPad. http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-hardwar... vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series_5XT (though depends on the clock actually used)

So, this phone's GPU is similar to the "new iPad"3 (quad-core sgx543). (Apple have also done a shrink, but it's only used in the old iPad 2 so far...)

I think quad-core CPUs are past the point of diminishing returns (consider the latest Transformer); multi-core are still hard to code for, and they are usually underutilized on desktops.

Note: the iPad 4 is likely to have the next in the GPU series (Rogue 6200), which apparently is comparable to the xenos GPU in the xbox360. So, it's leapfrog, jumping x2 as far each year.

Both ARM CPU's and GPU's seem to jump 2x in performance every year, so at least so far, they've been moving faster than Moore's Law.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the Exynos 5250 chip, with a dual core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 CPU and a Mali T-604 GPU (new Midgard architecture) that's supposed to be 4x faster than Mali400 (the original in GS2), so probably 2x or faster than the current overclocked Mali400 in GS3 (will also support OpenCL). This chip should appear in some tablets and phones, and maybe even a Chromebook by the end of the year.

I'm also looking forward to them pairing Cortex A15 with the ultra-low-power Cortex A7, maybe in a 2+2 core configuration. Samsung mentioned that they might be ready with Cortex A7 by the end of the year, but in general we can expect Cortex A7 to arrive next year.

I would prefer this over something like a pure Cortex A15 quad core chip, which should also appear next year. Starting with 2014 we should see the successor of Cortex A15 in dual core version, based on the 64 bit ARMv8 architecture.

I find it quite ironic that the same site posted this article 2 weeks ago: http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/04/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-htc-oppor...

Basically saying that the SGS3 looks like a dud and HTC is where it's at. HTC currently isn't able to import phones into the US.

Hmmm...

"Samsung’s new smartphone will launch on nearly 300 carriers in the coming months, and it will be a top seller."

I just read that article and it says nothing of the sort. It says the Galaxy S III will sell well, but it doesn't really innovate, thus opening the door for HTC to step up its marketing and sales strategy, and turn its struggling smartphone business around if it is up to the task.

Do you remember how much fun they had with the size of the Galaxy Note? BGR,buisinessinsider,gruber,siegler,the verge,... The whole techmeme club.

Then Samsung sold 5 million Notes in the first months.

A ton of films get trashed by critics and imdb then go on to be commercially successful.

That doesn't mean it was a good piece of film. More likely it was accessible everywhere and well marketed.

They weren't saying it was a bad phone. They were saying it was a joke that would never sell and the marketing for it was wasteful: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/02/15/geller-galaxy-no...

this is a good argument for sales vs quality.

But the lesson with the Galaxy Note was that many people want a device with a 5.3 in screen, and the critique was that people do not want a device with a 5.3 in screen.

Remember that Samsung sold the Note together with the Galaxy S2 (same hardware, smaller screen, higher marketing budget) and even smaller form factors.

Or, to put it another way: The lesson is that there is no "average consumer".

>Remember that Samsung sold the Note together with the Galaxy S2 (same hardware, smaller screen, higher marketing budget) and even smaller form factors.

The Note has been promoted much more than the S2. In SF I see as much ads for the Note as you used to see for the iPad 2 when it came out, which means they’re everywhere.

Last week three guys with Samsung t-shirts stopped me on the street to make me try it.

Has BGR ever written an article longer than a few paragraphs? (Edit: huh.. that struck a nerve it would seem).

First rule of tech blogging -- all stories, even those best reported as just one line, must be expanded to meet Google News's minimum word count requirement.

Still waiting for a high end Android phone that isn't enormous.

Now this is quite amazing . Has Samsung also started to attract an albeit smaller apple like following .. ?

Samsung sell more smartphones than Apple. http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipad-iphone/news/?newsid=3358104

It's certainly a good indicator of smartphone demand, although I'm not sure it's comparable with iPhone 4S pre-orders. I suspect that a lot of the S3 pre-orders are direct from carriers, rather than individuals, so it's more of a 'product shipped' rather than 'product sold' statistic.

I could of course be totally wrong, although as it's a leaked stat it's hard to know exactly how a 'pre-order' is being defined...but in my office (of about 180 people, all mobile facing) far fewer people have pre-ordered the S3 versus the iPhone 4S.

I guess Samsung phones are more popular outside US. Among my colleagues, of 10 smartphones, 8 are Samsung ones (includes 3 Samsung Notes) and only one iPhone4S.

Our split is fairly even (I lead a mobile dev team in London, both Android & iOS). Maybe it's a demographic thing: most developers have a Galaxy Nexus, and they don't really see any compelling reason to move on to the S3 right now.

I have the Samsung Nexus S and it's the best phone I've ever owned. (I had an iPhone before this one)

> CPU Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9 > GPU Mali-400MP

Finally, smooth animations?

I've been getting smooth animations on my Nexus S ever since I put ICS on it a few months back and this phone "only" has a 1 GHz single core CPU and 512 MB of RAM.

I just got my first Android phone (a 1ghz dual-core 512mb LG) and it its fuckin slow :( (my iPhone 3GS felt way way snappier).

Maybe it's the version of Android? I just got the HTC One X and everything flies on that phone. No delays or lag on anything. Best phone I've used to date (and I've had all iPhones except the 4s).

That's because in iOS the UI has maximum priority. It can even pause the app so the UI keeps a high framerate.

This is a myth, introduced by an uninformed Google intern in a blog post. Hint; start Skype on an iPhone, switch to another app, and scroll a list. Note how your Skype call continues.

Android phone responsiveness varies by a huge amount. Some are lightning fast while others just have lots of lag throughout the ui. I have found lg phones to be in the latter category.

That's pretty odd since I have a HTC Desire (single core 1GHz) which works really well. (Never been an iPhone owner though)

See if something like a 3rd party ROM like cyanogenmod is supported on your phone or just return it and get something like one of the HTCs or better yet an unlocked Galaxy Nexus straight from Google.

Pre-ICS versions of Android kind of sucked, due to the lack of GPU acceleration.

I suggest you look for a CM9 ROM for your phone on XDA.

Hm, there are builds of CM9, so I'll try that.

edit:

ICS (CM9) has much nicer looks and also feels snappier. The install was also pretty simple, to my surprise.

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