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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Finally. I've been suggesting this for years. Companies who want to really compete with apple should be trying radical designs. Tragic lack of tinkering on the hardware front.

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Companies who want to compete with Apple should try to understand what their customers would like better than the customers themselves. E.g. initial reaction to iPad and its success. Alas "radical design" usually ends up with UI astronautics and gimmicks which may be cool to show off once, but not really useable.

I agree with the tragic lack of tinkering, however, Samsung hasn't had to do anything radical on the design front to print crazy sums of profits successfully competing with Apple. They did of course have to produce great products.

Samsung produce great products and spend loads of money in advertising (Just like Apple). You can see the difference with HTC who also produce great phones, but lack on advertising spending. And they have suffered for it.

To say that Samsung "spends loads of money in advertising, just like Apple" is a bit stretching the truth, if Horace Dediu's estimations are to be believed:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...

Samsung seems to spend about an order of magnitude (10x) more on advertising than Apple.

Indeed. Seeing this really makes me feel even less sympathy for Microsoft's failure to gain traction with windows phone. They're just not doing anything particularly exciting.

When phones started being sealed i.e. battery not removable I thought wouldn't it be interesting to have a phone with displays on the front and back.

Not eInk but full displays on each side, don't ask me why.

That would be a pretty cool way to play battleship :)

A dual-sided tablet even better.

I want to make a tablet belt holster too.

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