Comment by fishgil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fishgil | Hacker News Reader

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Korean here. I know you are generalising but there are a lot of Koreans who hate Samsung. They are above the law, the Lee family is like the aristocrats before the French revolution, wield monopolistic powers and are a big bully.

Problem is, Koreans don't have a lot of choices when it comes to phones. You could either buy a Samsung phone, which are extremely cheap, have a big screen, nice colours and are overall good phones, or you could buy an LG which is seen to be inferior in every aspect. Then you have Apple and honestly, a lot of people do choose Apple but the price of a typical Samsung is so much cheaper.

So I guess a lot of Koreans buy Samsung because they don't really have another choice.

Re your comment about Koreans being image conscious and materialistic, I could not agree with you anymore. We are the most materialistic race on the planet probably. Not to mention proud.

So it's like: fuck you Samsung but thanks for making Korean a little bit more relevant in the tech industry.

One more Korean here.

"fuck you Samsung but thanks for making Korean a little bit more relevant in the tech industry."\n

-> I would have concurred 3-5 years ago, but I disagree now. I think now Samsung is the bottleneck which functions as an engineer hog and nefariously undermines their productivity/potential.

Take Tizen. An Army of 1,000+ developers have been working on it for years. What do they have now?

I am living in Finland which used to be the country of Nokia and the country is rebuilding itself post-Nokia. South Korea can do the same "without Samsung".

> the country is rebuilding itself post-Nokia

Surely you mean "post financial crisis". Nokia was big, but not that big, certainly not compared to the might of Samsung. Finland has been doing fine ever since joining the EU, and the ups and downs have been the same as most EU countries, with or without Nokia.

I think what is meant is "the Finnish tech industry is rebuilding since Nokia left".

The difference between Nokia and Samsung is that Nokia does not have supermarkets, home appliances, television channels, healthcare products, and more (although chaebol aren't supposed to have retail banking I believe still). Samsung going out of business for Korea would be like Google, Halliburton, GE, and Ford going out of business at the same time to the US economy - rather devastating I'd imagine and would take a good while to recover even though there's still a bit of competition across areas that they do business in.

Not to mention Techwin: http://www.samsungtechwin.com/product/product_05_01_01.asp

Why is LG seen to be inferior in every aspect? I personally think LG has better phones than Samsung, especially the UI. TouchWiz is horrible.

Agreed the LG UI is very nice (in comparison to Samsung's). I have an LG G3 and absolutely love it. Correction: I used to love it until I received the Lollipop upgrade which essentially blocks a small little feature not many users care about - notifications. Yes since upgrading I can no longer receive notifications unless I disable wifi. And even then notifications sometimes appear several hours later [1][2]

[1] http://forums.androidcentral.com/lg-g3/520160-updated-lollip...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/LGG3/comments/32l4xj/verizon_is_awar...

> Re your comment about Koreans being image conscious and materialistic, I could not agree with you anymore.

I think you meant "I could not agree with you any more" (it is not possible for me to agree with you more than I already am).

What you've written reads more like "I used to agree with you but something has changed to make me update my beliefs".

I got your point, but it confused me at first. English can be weird sometimes.

I could not agree with you more.

Samsung makes a lot of the components for the iPhone and other smartphones. Even if their branded devices crater, they'll be fine.

Apple routinely bounces back and forth between suppliers.

I would imagine Samsung would much prefer the guaranteed income into their components division from Samsung phone sales rather than intermittent incomes from Apple.

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