Samsung reported lower-than-expected profit for the second quarter on Thursday and said it was uncertain if handset business profit would improve during the current period, but a senior executive expressed hope that the launch of Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and another smartphone with new design and materials will be able to turn things around.

Robert Yi, Head of Investor Relations, told conference call that Samsung spent higher marketing expenses as competition increased in the mid- to low-end smartphones and because it tried to sell old products in the inventory ahead of new product launches in the fall. Tablet computers sales also fell, he said, citing weak demand.

Samsung did not unveil how many smartphones it sold. But research firm IDC estimated that Samsung shipped 74.3 million smartphones during the second quarter, down 4 percent from a year earlier, even as the overall smartphone market expanded 23 percent. Chinese vendors, Huawei and Lenovo, were the ones that largely drove global growth of smartphone sales, not Samsung.

Samsung was still the largest supplier of smartphones but its global market share fell to one quarter from 32 percent.

However, Kim Hyunjoon, Senior Vice President at Samsung's mobile business, told the conference call that several new handset models are in the pipeline for a launch in the next few months. They include a new flagship model in the large-screen category, presumably the Galaxy Note 4, which is expected to launch at IFA this year, and another premium phone with new designs and materials. Kim did not elaborate what the new materials would be, but it is possible that Samsung will finally move away from plastic and release a phone using metal.

However, that may not be enough for Samsung analysts said the company struggled in emerging markets as consumers using Android handsets were more willing to try devices from other brands. Switching between different Android devices has become easier and cheaper than before for consumers, giving less reasons for users to stick with one brand.

"We are hitting a phase where even in emerging markets people are not buying their first smartphones anymore. They are becoming more familiar with different kinds of brands," said Melissa Chau, senior research manager at IDC, a market research firm. "Just staying on Android is not going to keep you in one brand."

That would make it more important for Samsung to develop unique services just for its Galaxy phone users or come up with its own software that does not rely on Google's Android. But Samsung stumbled in its push to take a step away from Google service. Earlier this week, it delayed the release of the first smartphone powered by Tizen, its own mobile operating system, just two months after promising its release. It did not give a future schedule.

Written with inputs from Associated Press

Continue reading

3D printing is all the rage. You can hit a button on your computer, which sends a file to a printer, which produces a small 3D object out of plastic. It's a cool technology, but it's not exactly a hands-on way to make things.Enter the 3Doodler, the pen that turns you into the 3D printer.

The $99 3Doodler, made by Boston-based startup Wobbleworks, is a fat pen not unlike a hot glue gun. It needs to be plugged into a wall outlet. A stick of plastic goes in on the blunt end and comes out, melted, at the tip. As you move your hand, it leaves a thin trail of cooling, solidifying plastic. Move it around with a plan, laying down string upon string, and an object starts taking shape.

It's easy to get started. Within a few hours, I made a few rings, an unusable but cute eggcup, and a three-inch sculpture of a walking man. I made shoes for my daughter's Barbie by coating the doll's feet in plastic. They were popular until they broke a few minutes later.

The finished objects have a unique and intriguing look to them - they're all reminiscent of a jumble of fused plastic wire. But it's very hard to make anything durable or useful this way. The company behind the 3Doodle recommends making paper clips as one of the first exercises, and sure, you'll have paper clips, but they'll be the most fragile paper clips you've ever seen. Bending clips from steel wire would be a much better way to go, if you really need paper clips.

It's fun to work with plastic, though. Plastic has, so far, not been a do-it-yourselfer's material. You can whittle wood, machine metal, and mold clay. But plastic, that near ubiquitous material, has been out of reach. That's a pity, because it's pretty cute. It's light, colorful and easy to shape. It's too bad it's so fragile.

There are two types of plastic available. Polylactide or PLA is made from corn and is biodegradable. It comes in several colors, including attractive translucent ones. I found it the easiest material to work with. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, is opaque and more flexible. It's more easily recycled than PLA. It's hard to work with, in part because the strands don't stick that well to one another.

The plastic costs $10 for packs of 25 sticks. Each pack weighs about 1.5 ounces or 40 grams. When bought in big rolls for 3D printers, the same amount of plastic costs about $1, so 3Doodler's markup is pretty hefty.

While 3D printers for home and amateur use have gone through several cycles of improvement over the last five years or so, the 3Doodler is a first-generation product, and it shows. The speed of the plastic feed will vary, especially when you've fed in a fresh stick. When using ABS plastic, it stops frequently. This makes it difficult to build with precision. You can chose between "fast" and "slow" speeds, but even the slow one often feels too fast.

The pen can't feed the last bit of the stick, so when the plastic stops coming out of the head and you insert a new stick, a dozen inches of plastic from the old stick comes out first. This makes it difficult to switch colors without waste - serious 3Doodlers will probably want more than one pen for multicolor projects.

 think these are fixable problems - the next generation of pens should be better. And while they're at it, it would be great to get a few different extrusion heads - one that squeezes out square bars and another that does flat bands.

In the 3Doodler's favor, it's a much simpler machine than a 3D printer. I got a $1,000 printer from Solidoodle and didn't manage to produce a single usable thing. There were at least three things wrong with the printer, and fixing all of them would require a major investment in time. If you're buying a 3D printer, you're investing in a new hobby.

The 3Doodler, on the other hand, is a low-risk buy. It's fun to play with, and despite the markup on the plastic, a pretty good value, especially if you have kids or have an artistic sense. I did, eventually, figure out how to make a few things that were both useful and durable: a set of translucent napkin holders

---

Continue reading

Over the last couple weeks, many of my colleagues in the tech press have published reviews of the Galaxy S5, Samsung’s newest top-of-the-line smartphone. They all arrived at more or less the same conclusion: The S5 is a very nice device.
Although it offers no spectacular advances over the previous version, Samsung seems to have done just enough with the S5 to stay ahead of every other Android phone maker. The only plausible competition comes in the form of the HTC One, which, as my colleague Molly Wood wrote, is prettier than the S5 but not as functional. The upshot of all these reviews is that if you’re looking for the best Android phone, Samsung’s is the one to buy.
But that’s not the whole story. While there are probably some people who go out to shop for the best Android phone, I suspect that most people want to know which phone is best of all, whatever operating system it runs. In other words, how does the Galaxy S5 compare to the iPhone 5S, Apple’s six-month-old flagship device and the champion to beat?
The answer: Not very well. I’ve been using the new Samsung for about three weeks, and while I do think it is the best Android phone you can buy, it sure isn’t the best phone on the market. By just about every major measure you’ll care about, from speed to design to ease of use to the quality of its apps, Samsung’s phone ranks behind the iPhone, sometimes far behind. If you’re looking for the best phone on the market right now, I’d recommend going with the iPhone 5S.
This is not to say you’ll hate the Galaxy; as everyone says, it’s a great phone, and if you buy it you’ll be fine. The Galaxy does have slightly longer battery life than the iPhone, and it is waterproof, an unusual feature among top-end phones.
To me, though, these two advantages are slight. Indeed, for many people, there will only be a single obvious reason to buy the Galaxy S5 over the iPhone 5S: The Samsung phone has a much bigger screen. Size isn’t an objective advantage but rather a matter of preference — some people like big phones and some people like small ones. For the next few months, for big-phone lovers, Samsung’s massive size will make it the clear winner.
Yet that points to a looming problem for Samsung. News reports and common sense suggest that Apple will almost certainly unveil a bigger iPhone later this year. If you assume that everything else about the iPhone-versus-Galaxy matchup will remain the same after the size increase, it means that Samsung will lose its single greatest advantage over Apple.
And what will Samsung do then? When you compare the Galaxy to the iPhone, it’s not obvious that Samsung will have any real way to fight back once Apple makes a bigger phone.
I don’t mean to sound glib. But in many ways, the battle for smartphone supremacy is a pretty simple fight. Apple makes at least two thirds of the profit in the smartphone business, and Samsung makes about the other third. No one else makes any money selling smartphones, so any gain for Apple is a loss for Samsung, and vice versa.
In recent years, the growth rate for iPhone sales has slowed down. This is partly because, when it comes to expensive phones, consumer preferences appear to have shifted in favor of big phones — and Samsung has been more nimble than Apple at responding to the demand. Apple highlighted this fact in a sales presentation recently disclosed as part of its patent-infringement fight against Samsung. “Consumers want what we don’t have,” the document stated, noting that most of the growth in the profitable segment of the smartphone business had been in phones with screens larger than the iPhone’s 4-inch display.
But as my management-consultant friends say, the flip side of a problem is an opportunity. If Apple’s major shortcoming is a too-small phone, all it has to do is make its phone larger. Making a larger phone isn’t trivial, but it is a relatively easy fix. Apple has done it well before — two years ago, it put out the iPhone 5, which had a screen just a bit taller than its predecessor — and I suspect it can easily manage the transition once more.
Samsung’s problems, meanwhile, will be more difficult to address, as you can tell by spending some time with the S5. One of its major new features is a fingerprint-sensor meant to let you unlock your phone without typing a passcode, a feature Apple introduced on the iPhone 5S last year. I don’t fault Samsung for copying Apple’s fingerprint idea, just as I won’t fault Apple for copying Samsung when it makes a bigger phone. Fingerprint unlocking is a good idea, and more phones should have it.
But I do fault Samsung for the slipshod manner in which it introduced fingerprint scanning. I’ve been using the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor for the last six months, and it has worked about nine times out of 10 for me. The Galaxy S5’s finger sensor is unusable. It has failed to recognize my finger just about every time I have tried it. It has been so terrible that the sensor feels more like a marketing gimmick than a legitimate feature. And it makes me wonder about Samsung’s capacity to keep up with Apple’s innovations.
So, too, does the Galaxy’s speed. The S5 is really fast, but the iPhone 5S is faster. While the speed won’t be a big deal to most users (you’ll mainly notice it in games and web browsing), it does point to a problem for Samsung. The rapid increase in year-by-year mobile chip performance has been a hallmark of the phone business for years. It’s unusual in this industry for a new phone to be slower than a phone released six months ago. When Samsung’s Galaxy S4 came out last year, it was much faster than the iPhone 5 that preceded it. But this year, Samsung couldn’t keep up; as the speed-testing gurus at AnandTech showed, by just about every speed metric, the aging iPhone 5S beat the brand-new Galaxy S5.

Then there are the perennial problems for Samsung’s devices. Like the S4, the S5 has a cheap-feeling plastic body, and it’s hobbled by a proprietary software interface filled with byzantine menus and settings screens. You feel this complexity throughout the phone. Even in places where Samsung has introduced novel features that are better than Apple’s — like some of its advanced camera features — they’re buried in a user interface that makes them difficult to discover.
None of these problems are crippling for Samsung just yet. With its 5.1-inch screen, the Galaxy S5 is the best big phone you can buy, and it will be so for months. After that, though, Samsung’s smartphone ascendance may look a bit uncertain.

Continue reading

The refreshed HTC J Butterfly has been launched exclusively on KDDI - a Japanese telecom operator. As of now, there is no word on the pricing of the handset; however, the mobile carrier has announced late August availability for the smartphone.

Unfortunately, neither HTC or KDDI have revealed any details of whether the HTC J Butterfly will be available outside Japan.

The HTC J Butterfly runs on Android 4.4 KitKat, much like HTC's 2014 flagship, the One (M8). There is no word on J Butterfly's single or dual-SIM capabilities.

The smartphone features a 5-inch full-HD display and is a waterproof device. The HTC J Butterfly, much like the One (M8), runs on a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor (unspecified clock speed) and 2GB RAM. It's worth noting that HTC's One (M8) (Review | Pictures) is powered by 2.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, alongside 2GB of RAM. The J Butterfly comes with 32GB of inbuilt storage, with expandable storage via microSD card (up to 128GB).

It sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with dual-LED flash, while it also houses a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. Notably, the HTC J Butterfly also sports the dual rear camera setup, first seen on the 2014 flagship handset. However, KDDI calls the rear setup as "Duo Effect" camera in the press statement. The J Butterfly will be available in Rouge, Canvas and Indigo colour options.

The smartphone supports LTE connectivity (Japan's 4G LTE bands) apart from Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS/ A-GPS, GPRS/ EDGE and 3G connectivity options. The HTC J Butterfly comes with a 2700mAh battery, weighs 156 grams, and has dimensions of 145x70x10mm. Further, the smartphone supports HTC's much-touted Dot View Case, which was unveiled alongside the One (M8). The One (M8) came with a 2600mAh battery.

Continue reading