Twitter’s newest feature is reigniting the ‘iPhone vs Android’ war

Twitter’s newest feature is reigniting the flame war between iOS and Android owners.

The U.S. social media company’s latest addition is a subtle piece of information that shows the client that each tweet is sent from. In doing so, the company now displays whether a user tweets from the web or mobile and, if they are on a phone, whether they used Twitter’s iOS or Android apps, or a third-party service.

The feature — which was quietly enabled on Twitter’s mobile clients earlier this month; it has long been part of the TweetDeck app — has received a mixed response from users since CEO Jack Dorsey spotlighted it.

Some are happy to have additional details to dig into for context, for example, whether a person is on mobile or using third-party apps, but others believe it is an unnecessary addition that is stoking the rivalry between iOS and Android fans.

Source information back in the tweets pic.twitter.com/q5Qp7U8oS2

— jack (@jack) December 20, 2018

Interestingly, the app detail isn’t actually new. Way back in 2012 — some six years ago — Twitter stripped out the information as part of a series of changes to unify users across devices, focus on service’s reading experience and push people to its official apps where it could maximize advertising reach.

That was a long time ago — so long that TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino was still a reporter when he wrote about it; he and I were at another publication altogether — and much has changed at Twitter, which has grown massively in popularity to reach 330 million users.

Back in 2012, Twitter was trying to reign in the mass of third-party apps that were popular with users in order to centralize its advertising to get itself, and its finances, together before going public. Twitter’s IPO happened in 2013 and it did migrate most users to its own apps, but it did a terrible job handling developers and thus, today, there are precious few third-party apps. That’s still a sore point with many users, since the independent apps were traditionally superior with better design and more functions. Most are dead now and Twitter’s official apps reign supreme.

Many Twitter users may not be aware of the back story, so it is pretty fascinating to see some express uncertainty at displaying details of their phone. Indeed, a number of Android users lamented that the new detail is ‘exposing’ their devices.

Here’s a selection of tweets:

Thank god I switched to iPhone before this new twitter update cause chile, these android users are….. nvmd pic.twitter.com/5lkR2BGXbg

— EFRAIN (@DOMXXXTOP) December 22, 2018

Twitter is trying to expose us android users

— Marion (@bIackprincessa) December 22, 2018

twitter said: time to expose people with androids pic.twitter.com/ujl0WvTlzM

— el ✰ vacation (@angeIichoney) December 22, 2018

Omg twitter! What a discrimination towards android users! Perlu ke cakap twitter for android or twitter for iphone?! Hina sangat ke pakai android?!!

— (@hani_farisha22) December 21, 2018

Since Twitter can show what a person is tweeting with Android, iPhone etc.. We are going to be selective when we reply, can't be back chatting to someone who is using android. pic.twitter.com/FnxscpM7ah

— Terry (@TENDANIL) December 22, 2018

So Twitter released a new update where you will see thee kinda phone someone is tweeting from, either iPhone or Android… I've been scrolling for five minutes and all the tweets are from iPhones… Except mine pic.twitter.com/mY0tGE5SVw

— Your Class Rep (@DaRealSeguncool) December 22, 2018

twitter out here exposing ppl with this ‘twitter for iphone/android’ shit huh

— nia (@farfromhcme) December 22, 2018

Twitter for iphone
Twitter for android
Twitter lite

The iphone v samsung fights are about to turn savage

— Nyasha (@NyashaSamsunga) December 8, 2018

Now Twitter let you know who uses IPhone and who uses Android and seems like I'm the only who uses Android here

— Liya | (@xliamstanxx) December 8, 2018

So now twitter tells me who's tweeting from Android or Iphone? I guess all us Android peasents need to start stockpiling ammo and jarring our urine.

— the_silver fox (@the_silverfox1) December 9, 2018

Twitter for iPhone / Twitter for Android pic.twitter.com/G6Rd208Qtp

— Intrapiernoso (@INTRAPlERNOSO) December 22, 2018

I could go on — you can see more here — but it seems like, for many, iPhone is still the ultimate status symbol over Android despite the progress made by the likes of Samsung, Huawei and newer Android players Xiaomi and Oppo.

While it may increase arguments between mobile’s two tribes, the feature has already called out brands and ambassadors using the ‘wrong’ device. Notable examples including a Korean boyband sponsored by LG using iPhones or the Apple Music team sending a tweet via an Android device. Suddenly spotting these mismatches is a whole lot easier.

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On stock prices and Nvidia

Yesterday’s analysis of Nvidia’s challneges triggered a surge of mail from readers. The company has lost about half of its value over the past two months, and has mostly blamed a “crypto hangover” for the problem. But as I pointed yesterday, it’s really the three Cs: “Crypto, customers, and China.” There are nuances here worth exploring though.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Rapacious capitalists and short-termism

One major vein of reader feedback was around the remarkable short-termism of my analysis, which (mostly) looked at Nvidia over the past 60 days. As a reader named Stephen wrote to me:

By focusing on the peak price from this summer and its fall you ignore the fact that the stock price today is nearly the same as it was in June of 2017. Nvidia was on a huge run because of Bitcoin and the associated run on GPUs by miners. With the crypto currency market in decline so is the demand for advanced GPUs.

There is nothing Nvidia can do about that. They profited greatly from that blip and now they are returning to normal.

That’s entirely fair. After diving in the 2008 financial crisis along with the rest of the market, Nvidia’s market cap steadily gained value for nearly seven years, growing from around $3.6 billion in 2008 to around $15 billion at the end of 2015, far outpacing the S&P 500 or other standard benchmarks.

As the crypto craze took off in 2016 though, that fairly linear growth became exponential. The company hit a peak this past August, reaching $175 billion in value, only to slam back down to Earth with today’s $91.2 billion. So in about three full years — even with the last two month’s 50% drop — the company has managed to grow its market value roughly six times. That’s very strong growth for an established company, even in the technology sector.

The key question though is whether today’s market value is backed by the company’s positioning in the marketplace.

As much as Nvidia has blamed the collapse of crypto prices for its challenging position, that is hardly the whole story. New competition from startups and its own customers are challenging the company on its plan to dominate a series of new workload applications like machine learning and autonomous vehicles.

If Nvidia succeeds, its market cap makes a whole lot of sense. But if it fails to keep a market dominant position in these new applications, then it will have to revert back to its core gamer audience, and today’s market cap makes no sense given the limited size and growth of that market.

China / Nvidia

China remains a major site for manufacturing and assembly. STR/AFP/Getty Images

Another strain of readers asked for more analysis around China tariffs and their potential effect on Nvidia (you short sellers are a fascinating lot).

Let’s be clear on my position: I expect the trade conflict to get worse, not better. There is not a single issue for Trump that has better optics, political positioning, and broad support than improving the status quo around China trade. There is broad bipartisan agreement that the status quo is untenable, and while folks might disagree about specific approaches or tactics, no one thinks that China has played fair in trade for years. Trump can look like a fighter for the American worker while bringing (some) Democrats and most of his entire party on board. It’s a potent issue.

That places Nvidia in a real bind, because China is a critical end market for its products, and its manufacturing is heavily intertwined with Chinese supply chains. As just an example of this, just a few months ago, Nvidia chose TSMC over Samsung in a bidding competition to produce its large GPUs.

As Arman and I have talked with some supply chain folks about tariffs, the general consensus is that low tariffs won’t have much impact, but higher tariffs will force huge changes in the way supply chains are built to counteract those costs. That seems to be the conclusion of Debby Wu at Bloomberg as well within the iPhone supply chain world.

That said, as much as I think there should be caution on this front, Nvidia is in a relatively enviable position. Its contract manufacturers will have to deal with the tariffs directly, but Nvidia can move its manufacturing to wherever it needs to go — Korea, Vietnam, back to the U.S. or wherever. There is of course some time lag, but I would be much more worried about TSMC’s position long-term than Nvidia’s.

Quick Bites

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories, outside our main analysis

SBI Says It Made An Error Allocating Shares in SoftBank IPO – one of the underwriters for SoftBank’s IPO accidentally sent lower share numbers to some buyers, leading to speculation that the company was dealing with a mass selloff. Things seem to be righted, and blockchain enthusiasts will once again get to scream “BLOCKCHAIN” at another financial markets screwup.

The North Face – Cory Arcangel does a great job of decomposing the modern EDM “product” and placing it into today’s context — with some nice connections to our discussion above about Nvidia. “EDM is the perfect reflection of 2018. It is intense, adrenaline-fueled, all-night music made by hyper efficient, work-a-holic, laptop bureaucrats.” Talking about Steve Angello and his rapid series of engagements on the EDM circuit: “Instead, he—his literal, physical self—was being shipped around, with minutes to spare, as part of an intricate just-in-time supply chain. Like Apple’s, this supply chain is also exceedingly light—Angello is the only asset required.” Hat tip to Robert Cottrell at The Browser for this one.

Semiconductor equipment sales forecast: $62B in 2018 a new record – More uplift for 2018, if some challenges in 2019 forecasted. “In 2018, South Korea will remain the largest equipment market for the second year in a row. China will rise in the rankings to claim the second spot for the first time, dislodging Taiwan, which will fall to the third position.” It will be interesting to see how tariffs affect these numbers next year.

What’s next

More semiconductors probably. And Arman and I are side glancing at Yelp these days. Any thoughts? Email me at danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

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Samsung refreshes its S Pen-packing convertible PC

Welcome, friends, to the consumer electronics dead zone. It’s that increasingly brief window between the last of the pre-holiday releases and the CES deluge. It’s rarely home to genuinely exciting announcements, but when you’re a company like Samsung, you’ve got to find somewhere on the roadmap to portion out all of those gadgets.

Say hello to the new Notebook 9 Pen. It’s a convertible Windows laptop aimed at creatives. It’s a very Samsungy answer to the Surface line, right down to the inclusion of the S Pen. The PC sports a swiveling 13 or 15 inch screen encased in an all-metal frame.

It’s an update to he admittedly somewhat confusingly named line, still sporting an 8th-gen Intel Core i7 and a hearty 15 hours of battery life by Samsung’s estimation. On-board audio has been improved, courtesy of the company’s AKG arm. The S Pen also gets some upgrades here, with improved latency and three swappable tips.

Today’s news is the latest in what’s been an uncharacteristically noisy holiday season for Samsung, including the recent partial announcement of two 5G phones due out next year. A spate of new rumors also have the company announcing the Galaxy S10 around MWC in Feb/March. And then, of course, there’s that folding phone. Should be a packed 2019 for the company, all around.

The new Notebook 9 Pen, meanwhile, is due out in the States early next year.

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Move over notch, the hole-punch smartphone camera is coming

First it was the notch, now the hole-punch has emerged as the latest tech for concealing selfie cameras whilst keeping our smartphones as free of bezel as possible to maximize the screen space.

This week, Samsung and Huawei both unveiled new phones that dispense with the iconic ‘notch’ — pioneered by Apple but popularized by everyone — in favor of positioning the front-facing camera in a small “Infinity-O” hole located on the top left side of the screen.

Dubbed hole-punch, the approach is part of Samsung’s new Galaxy A8s and Huawei’s View 20, which were unveiled hours apart on Tuesday. Huawei was first by just hours, although Samsung has been pretty public with its intention to explore a number notch alternatives including the hole-punch, which makes sense given that it has persistently mocked Apple for the feature.

The Samsung Galaxy S8a will debut in China with a hole-punch spot for the camera [Image via Samsung]

Don’t expect to see any hole-punches just yet though.

The Samsung A8s is just for China right now while the View 20 isn’t being fully unveiled until December 26 in China and, for global audiences, January 22 in Paris. We also don’t have a price for either, but they do represent a new trend that could become widely-adopted across phones from other OEMs in 2019.

That’s certainly Samsung’s plan. The Korea firm is rolling the hole-punch out on the A8s, but it has plans to expand its adoption into other devices and series. The A8s itself is pretty mid-range, but that makes it an ideal candidate to test the potential appeal of a more subtle selfie camera since Samsung’s market share has fallen in China where local rivals have pushed it hard. It starts there, but it could yet be adopted in higher-end devices with global availability.

As for the View 20, Huawei has also been pretty global with its ambitions, except in the U.S. where it hasn’t managed to strike a carrier deal despite reports that it has been close before. The current crisis with its CFO — the daughter of the company’s founder who was arrested during a trip to Canada — is another stark reminder that Huawei’s business is unlikely to ever get a break in the U.S. market: so except the View 20 to be a model for Europe and Asia.

Huawei previewed its View 20 with a punch-hole selfie camera lens this week [Image via Huawei]

Samsung hasn’t said a tonne about the hole-punch design, but our sister publication Engadget — which attended the View 20’s early launch event in Hong Kong — said it was mounted below the display “like a diamond” to maintain the structure.

“This hole is not a traditional hole,” Huawei told Engadget.

Huawei will no doubt also talk up the fact that its hole is 4.5mm versus an apparent 6mm from Samsung.

Small details aside, one important upcoming trend from these new devices is the birth of the ‘mega’ megapixel smartphone camera.

The View 20 packs a whopping 48-megapixel lens for a rear camera which something that we’re going to see a lot more of in 2019. Xiaomi, for one, is preparing a January launch for a device that’ll have the 48-megapixels, according to a message on Sina Weibo from company co-founder Bin Lin. There’s no word on what camera enclosure that device will have, though.

Xiaomi teased an upcoming smartphone that’ll sport a 48-megapixel camera [Image via Bin Lin/Weibo]

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Payment service Toss becomes Korea’s newest unicorn after raising $80M

South Korea has got its third unicorn startup after Viva Republica, the company beyond popular payment app Toss, announced it has raised an $80 million round at a valuation of $1.2 billion.

This new round is led by U.S. firms Kleiner Perkins and Ribbit Capital, both of which cut their first checks for Korea with this deal. Others participating include existing investors Altos Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, KTB Network, Novel, PayPal and Qualcomm Ventures. The deal comes just six months after Viva Republica raised $40 million to accelerate growth, and it takes the company to nearly $200 million raised from investors to date.

Toss was started in 2013 by former dentist SG Lee who grew frustrated by the cumbersome way online payments worked in Korea. Despite the fact that the country has one of the highest smartphone penetrations rates in the world and is a top user of credit cards, the process required more than a dozen steps and came with limits.

“Before Toss, users required five passwords and around 37 clicks to transfer $10. With Toss users need just one password and three steps to transfer up to KRW 500,000 ($430),” Lee said in a past statement.

Working with traditional finance

Today, Viva Republica claims to have 10 million registered users for Toss — that’s 20 percent of Korea’s 50 million population — while it says that it is “on track” to reach a $18 billion run-rate for transactions in 2018.

The app began as Venmo-style payments, but in recent years it has added more advanced features focused around financial products. Toss users can now access and manage credit, loans, insurance, investment and more from 25 financial service providers, including banks.

Fintech startups are ‘rip it out and start again’ in the West –such as Europe’s challenger banks — but, in Asia, the approach is more collaborative and assistive. A numbe of startups have found a sweet spot in between banks and consumers, helping to match the two selectively and intelligently. In Toss’s case, essentially it acts as a funnel to help traditional banks find and vet customers for services. Thus, Toss is graduating from a peer-to-peer payment service into a banking gateway.

“Korea is a top 10 global economy, but no there’s no Mint or Credit Karma to help people save and spend money smartly,” Lee told TechCrunch in an interview. “We saw the same deep problems we need to solve [as the U.S.] so we’re just digging in.”

“We want to help financial institutions to build on top of Toss… we’re kind of building an Amazon for the financial services industry,” he added. “We try to aggregate all those activities, covering saving accounts, loan products, insurance etc.”

Former dentist SG Lee started Toss in 2013.

Lee said the plan for the new money is to go deeper in Korea by advancing the tech beyond Toss, adding more users and — on the supply side — partnering with more companies to offer financial products.

There’s plenty of competition. Startups like PeopleFund focus squarely on financial products, while Kakao, Korea’s largest messaging platform, has a dedicated fintech division — KakaoPay — which rivals Toss on both payment and financial services. It also counts the mighty Alibaba in its corner courtesy of a $200 million investment from its Ant Financial affiliate.

Alibaba and Tencent tend to move in pairs as opposites, with one naturally gravitating to the rivals of the other’s investees as recently happened in the Philippines. It’s tricky in Korea, though. Tencent is caught in limbo since it is a long-standing Kakao backer. But might the Ant Financial deal spur Tencent into working with Toss?

Lee said his company has a “good relationship” with Tencent, including the occasional home/away visits, but there’s nothing more to it right now. That’s intriguing.

Overseas expansion plans

Also of interest is future plans for the business now that it is taking on significantly more capital from investors who, even with the most patient money out there, eventually need a return on their investment.

Lee is adamant that he won’t sell, despite Viva Republica increasingly looking like an ideal entry point for a payment or finance company that has missed the Korean market and wants in now.

He said that there are plans to do an IPO “at some point,” but a more immediate focus is the opportunity to expand overseas.

When Toss raised a PayPal-led $48 million Series C 18 months ago, Lee told TechCrunch that he was beginning to cast his eyes on opportunities in Southeast Asia, the region of over 650 million consumers, and that’s likely to see definitive action next year. The Viva Republica CEO said that Vietnam could be a first overseas launchpad for Toss.

“We’re thinking seriously about going beyond Korea because sooner or later we will hire saturation point,” Lee said. “We think Vietnam is quite promising. We’ve talked to potential partners and are currently articulating ideas and strategy materialized next year.

“We already have a very successful playbook, we know how to scale among users,” Lee added.

While the plan is still being put together, Lee suggested that Viva Republica would take its time expanding across Southeast Asia, where six distinct countries account for the majority of the region’s population. So, rather than rapidly expanding Toss across those markets, he indicated that a more deliberate, country-by-country launch could be the strategy with Vietnam kicking things off in 2019.

The Toss team at HQ in Seoul, Korea

Korea rising

Toss’s entry into the unicorn club — a vaunted collection of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more — comes weeks after Coupang, Korea’s top e-commerce company, raised $2 billion at a valuation of $9 billion.

While that Coupang round came from the SoftBank Vision Fund — a source of capital that is threatening to become tainted given its links to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — it does represent the first time that a Korea-based company has joined the $100 billion mega-fund’s portfolio.

Some milestones can be dismissed as frivolous, but these two coming so close together are a signal of increased awareness of the potential of Korea as a startup destination by investors outside of the country.

While Lee admitted that the unicorn valuation “doesn’t change a lot” in daily terms for his business, he did admit that he has seen the landscape shift for Korea’s startup ecosystem — which has only two other privately-held unicorns: Coupang and Yello Mobile.

“More and more global VCs are aware that South Korea is a really good opportunity to do a startup. It is getting easier for our fellow entrepreneurs to pitch and get access to global funds,” he said, adding that Korea’s top 25 cities have a cumulative population (25 million) that matches America’s top 25.

Despite that potential, Korea has tended to focus on its ‘chaebol’ giants like Samsung — which accounts for a double-digital percentage of the national economy — LG, Hyundai and SK. That means a lot of potential startup talent, both founders and employees, is locked up in secure corporate jobs. Throw in the conservative tradition of family expectations, which can make it hard for children to justify leaving the safety of a big company, and it is perhaps no wonder that Korea has relatively fewer startups compared to other economies of comparable size.

But that is changing.

Coupang has been one of the highest profile examples to follow, alongside the (now public) Kakao business. But with Viva Republica, Toss and a charismatic dentist-turned-founder, another startup story is being written and that could just inspire a future generation of entrepreneurs to rise up and be counted in South Korea.

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AT&T announces a second Samsung 5G smartphone for 2019

Leave it to Samsung to talk up its second 5G smartphone before most companies have tipped their first. A few days after announcing its first 5G handset via Verizon, the company is already on to number two. This one comes via an AT&T press release that qualifies the handset a bit more, calling it “another standards-based 5G device.”

Shortly after Verizon was first with the original Samsung 5G news, both AT&T and Sprint announced that they would be getting the handset, as well. That device is scheduled, broadly, for some time in the first half of the year. This one, meanwhile, will likely be arriving in the second half. “Likely” because of road maps and all of that stuff that’s ultimately subject to change. 

The device will “be able to access both 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz.” Beyond that, unsurprisingly, there’s about as much detail as we got the first time around. The rest of the release finds the carrier talking up its wireless plans, going forward, and noting that this deal brings it up to three 5G devices, including a mobile hotspot announced in late October.

It’s a bit unlike smartphone makers to tip their hands this far out, but between these handsets and the foldable prototype the company recently showed off, Samsung is clearly making an effort to demonstrate the innovation it’s got in the works. That appears to be, at least in part, due to somewhat lackluster sales in 2018. Wireless carriers, meanwhile, are clearly falling all over themselves to be the first announced partner for these devices.

Given the fairly lengthy lead time, the companies don’t risk cannibalizing holiday sales too much, especially with some deep December discounts on flagship devices.

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Samsung fakes test photo by using a stock DSLR image

Samsung’s Malaysian arm has some explaining to do. The company, in an effort to show off the Galaxy A8 Star’s amazing photo retouching abilities, used a cleverly-shot portrait, modified it, and then ostensibly passed it off as one taken by the A8.

The trouble began when Serbian photographer Dunja Djudjic noticed someone had bought one of her photos from a service called EyeEm that supplies pictures to Getty Images, a renowned photo reseller. Djudjic, curious as to the buyer, did a quick reverse search and found her image – adulterated to within an inch of its life – on Samsung’s Malaysian product page.

Djudjic, for her part, was a good sport.

My first reaction was to burst out into laughter. Just look at the Photoshop job they did on my face and hair! I’ve always liked my natural hair color (even though it’s turning gray black and white), but I guess the creator of this franken-image prefers reddish tones. Except in the eyes though, where they removed all of the blood vessels.

Whoever created this image, they also cut me out of the original background and pasted me onto a random photo of a park. I mean, the original photo was taken at f/2.0 if I remember well, and they needed the “before” and “after” – a photo with a sharp background, and another one where the almighty “portrait mode” blurred it out. So Samsung’s Photoshop master resolved it by using a different background.

This move follows a decision by Huawei to pull the same stunt with a demo photo in August.

To be fair, Samsung warned us this would happen. “The contents within the screen are simulated images and are for demonstration purposes only,” they write in the fine print, way at the bottom of the page. Luckily for Djudjic, Samsung paid her for her photo.

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Consumer electronics giant Samsung just became the world’s spendiest advertiser, bypassing Proctor & Gamble

Who rules the roost in the business world is very much in flux. We see it on a daily basis, with the mantle of “most valuable company” being passed between Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, depending on the day.

Another interesting data point that highlights some of the jockeying for dominance behind the scenes: For the first time, South Korea’s Samsung has beat out packaged goods company Proctor & Gamble in terms of the advertising dollars it’s putting to work. According to new data from AdAge, the consumer electronics and appliance maker splashed out $11.2 billion for advertising and sales promotion last year, compared with P&G, which spent an estimated $10.5 billion.

Samsung, which has a $300 billion market cap, may have spent so heavily in part to counter bad press, including around its Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone, which had the unfortunate capability of spontaneously bursting into flames. Fighting Apple for constant mindshare isn’t cheap, either. For example, you may have noticed the flurry of anti-iPhone X ads that the company churned out ahead of the release of its Galaxy Note 9 unveiling — an effort to boost its bottom line after sales of its Galaxy S9 phone disappointed.

Samsung isn’t the only tech brand that’s pumping up the volume when it comes to ad spending. Amid the companies accelerating their ad budgets the most quickly are China’s biggest online retailer, Alibaba Group Holding, which reportedly more than doubled its 2017 advertising spending to $2.7 billion in 2017. And Alibaba is trailed, unsurprisingly, by one of its biggest rivals, Tencent Holdings, whose $2 billion in related spend last year was nearly double what it was in 2016.

Though the two are undisputed powerhouses in China, they’re currently locked in a battle for Southeast Asia and India, and it’s a costly war to wage.

Others in the tech world to dominate AdAge’s tally include Alphabet, Netflix and Amazon, which reportedly boosted their 2017 spending by 32 percent, 29 percent and 26 percent, respectively.

Altogether, says AdAge, the U.S. is home to 44 of the companies spending the most of marketing, followed by 13 companies in Japan, 10 companies in Germany and nine companies in France.

You can dig into more of its findings, including a look at the 100 companies and industries that currently spend the most on advertising, here.

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AT&T says it’s getting that 5G Samsung phone, too

Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019.

The carrier issued a next-day press release which, like Verizon’s, is less focused on information about the handset than self-congratulatory statements about the two companies involved. AT&T promises “unforeseen possibilities for the tech,” while pledging to “bring the best in technology and innovation to our customers.”

The company’s also quick to note that the untitled Samsung isn’t its first planned 5G device. That title belongs to a mobile hotspot the company announced back in October. The company hasn’t offered up a release date on that one, but the first half of 2019 seems like a pretty safe bet for that product, too.

As noted yesterday, companies like OnePlus and Motorola have already promised to release 5G handsets at some point next year. Apple, on the other hand, isn’t expected to go 5G with the iPhone until 2020.

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Samsung will release a 5G phone in 2019

Samsung tipped its hand yet again, revealing another key piece of its 2019 roadmap. As it did with the foldable phone a few weeks back, the company will be revealing a proof concept this week at the annual Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Maui.

Details around things like specs are likely to be pretty light once again, though Samsung and mobile partner Verizon are shooting for a release sometime in the first half of next year. Qualcomm is a key hardware partner here as well, producing the Snapdragon X50 5G NR modem and antenna modules via the Snapdragon Mobile Platform.

The news finds Samsung joining a handful of companies promising to deliver 5G smartphones in 2019, including OnePlus and Motorola — though the latter will be accomplishing this via Moto Mod. Samsung’s chief competitor Apple, meanwhile, is not expected to embrace the technology until 2020, according to the latest rumors.

Samsung has already publicly embraced the technology, showing off a 5G home router way back at Mobile World Congress 2017. Our corporate bosses at Verizon, meanwhile, have been demonstrating home 5G service in a smattering of US cities, including Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

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Bright spots in the VR market

Virtual Reality is in a public relations slump. Two years ago the public’s expectations for virtual reality’s potential was at its peak. Many believed (and still continue to believe) that VR would transform the way we connect, interact, and communicate in our personal and professional lives.

Google Trends highlighting search trends related to Virtual Reality over time; the “note” refers to an improvement in Google’s data collection system that occurred in early 2016

It’s easy to understand why this excitement exists once you put on a head mounted display. While there are still a limited number of compelling experiences, after you test some of the early successes in the field, it’s hard not to extrapolate beyond the current state of affairs to a magnificent future where the utility of virtual reality technology is pervasive.

However, many problems still exist. The all-in cost for state of the art headsets is still out of reach for the mass market. Most ‘high-quality’ virtual reality experiences still require users to be tethered to their desktops. The setup experience for mass market users is lathered in friction. When it comes down to it, the holistic VR experience is a non-starter for most people. We are effectively in what Gartner refers to as the “trough of disillusionment.”

Gartner’s hype cycle for “Human-Machine Interface” in 2018 places many related VR related fields (e.g., Mixed Reality, AR, HMDs, etc.) in the “Trough of Disillusionment”

Yet, the virtual reality market has continued its slow march to mass adoption, and there are tangible indicators that suggest we could be nearing an inflection point.

A shift towards sustainable hardware growth

What you do and do not consider a virtual reality display can dramatically impact your view on the state of the VR hardware industry. Head-mounted displays (HMDs) can be categorized in three different ways:

• Screenless viewers — affordable devices that turn smartphones into a VR experience (e.g., Google Glass, Samsung Gear VR, etc.)
• Standalone HMDs — devices that are not connected to a computer and can independently run content (e.g., Oculus Go, Lenovo Mirage Solo, etc.)
• Tethered HMDs — devices that are connected to a desktop computer in order to run content (e.g., HTC Vive, Oculus Pro, etc.)

2018 has seen disappointing progress in aggregate headset growth. The overall market is forecasted to ship 8.9M headsets in 2018, up from an approximate aggregate shipment of ~8.3M in 2017, according to IDC. On the surface, those numbers hardly describe a market at its inflection point.

However, most of the decline in growth rate can be attributed to two factors. First, screenless viewers have seen a significant decline in shipments as device manufacturers have stopped shipping them alongside smartphones. In the second quarter of 2018, 409K screenless viewers were shipped compared to approximately 1M in the second quarter of 2017. Second, tethered VR headsets have also declined as manufacturers have slowed down the pricing discounts that acted as a steroid to sales growth in 2017.

Looking at the market for standalone HMDs, however, reveals a more promising figure. Standalone VR headsets grew 417% due to the global availability of the Oculus Go and Xiaomi Mi VR. Over time, these headsets are going to be the driver of the VR market as they offer significant advantages compared to tethered headsets.

The shift from tethered to standalone VR headsets is significant. It represents a paradigm shift within the immersive ecosystem, where developers have a truly mobile platform that is powerful enough to enable compelling user experiences.

IDC forecasts for AR/VR headset market share by form factor, 2018–2022

A premium market segment

There are a few names that come to mind when thinking about products that are available for purchase in the VR market: Samsung, Facebook (Oculus), HTC, and Playstation. A plethora of new products from these marquee names —  and products from new companies entering the market —  are opening the category for a new customer segment.

For the past few years, the market effectively had two segments. The first was a “mass market” segment with notorious devices such as the Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear, which typically sold for under $100 and offered severely constrained experiences to consumers. The second segment was a “pro market” with a few notable devices, such as the HTC Vive, that required absurdly powerful computing rigs to operate, but offered consumers more compelling, immersive experiences.

It’s possible that this new emerging segment will dramatically open up the total addressable VR market. This “premium” market segment offers product alternatives that are somewhat more expensive than the mass market, but are significantly differentiated in the potential experiences that can be offered (and with much less friction than the “pro market”).

The Oculus Go, the Xiaomi Mi VR, and the Lenovo Solo are the most notable products in this segment. They are the fastest growing devices in this segment, and represent a new wave of products that will continue to roll out. This segment could be the tipping point for when we move from the early adopters to the early majority in the VR product adoption curve.

A number of other products have also been released throughout 2018 that fall into this category, such as Lenovo’s Mirage Solo and Xiaomi’s Mi VR. Even more so, Oculus recently announced that  they’ll be shipping a new headset called Quest this spring, which will sell for $399 and will be the most powerful example of a premium device to date. The all-in price range of ~$200–400 places these devices in a segment consumers are already conditioned to pay (think iPad’s, gaming consoles, etc.), and they offer differentiated experiences primarily attributed to the fact that they are standalone devices.

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South Korea indicts group for allegedly leaking Samsung flexible display tech to Chinese company

Prosecutors in South Korea have indicted the chief executive and eight other employees of Toptec Co for allegedly selling information about Samsung’s flexible OLED displays to a Chinese company. The charges detail that the company received more than $13.8 million for the information, Bloomberg reports.

Toptec, a Samsung supplier that manufactures display-related equipment, has denied the charges in a statement. “Our company has never provided Samsung Display’s industrial technology or business secrets to a Chinese client. Our company will fully cooperate with legal proceedings to find the truth in court.” The company’s share price is down 20 percent at the time of writing.

Samsung’s flexible display tech probably makes you think of their weird and yet-to-be-released foldable phone that they just showed off earlier this month. Samsung’s been deep in the flexible display business for a while though even if their bends have been less acute like the designs of much older handsets like the Galaxy S6 Edge.

The Chinese company was not named in the suit though there are a number of companies working to produce flexible displays for smartphones.

South Korea’s national interests are deeply intertwined with the business dealings of Samsung, and the threat of intellectual property theft to China is one which they seem to be taking very seriously. We have reached out to Samsung for comment.

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Google Fi now officially supports most Android devices and iPhones

Google is making a major move to expand the availability of its Fi wireless service.

It’s been a few years since Google launched Project Fi with the promise of doing things a bit differently than the large carriers. Because it could switch between the cell networks of multiple providers to give you the best signal, the service only ever officially supported a select number of handsets. You could always trick it by activating the service on a supported phone and then moving your SIM card to another (including an iPhone), but that was never supported.

That’s changing today, though. The company is opening up Fi — and renaming it to Google Fi — and officially expanding device support to most popular Android phones, as well as iPhones. Supported Android phones include devices from Samsung, LG, Motorola and OnePlus. iPhone support is currently in beta, and there are a few extra steps to set it up, but the Fi iOS app should now be available in the App Store.

One thing you might not get with many of the now-supported phones is the full Fi experience, with network switching and access to Google’s enhanced network features, including Google’s VPN network. For that, you’ll still need a Pixel phone, the Moto G6 or any other device that you can buy directly in the Fi store.

Fi on all phones comes with the usual features, like bill protection, free high-speed international roaming and support for group plans.

To sweeten the deal, Google is also launching a somewhat extraordinary promotion today: If you open a new Fi account — or if are an existing user — you can buy any phone in the Fi shop today and get your money back in the form of a travel gift card that you can use for a flight with Delta or Southwest, or lodging with Airbnb and Hotels.com. There’s some fine print, of course (you need to keep your account active for a few months, etc.), but if you were looking at getting Fi anyway, like to travel and want to get a Pixel 3 XL, that’s not a bad deal at all.

The fine print is below:

Travel on Fi with Any Device Purchase Promotion Terms (Google Fi)

Limited time, 24-hour offer applies to any qualifying device purchased from fi.google.com from 11/28/18 12:00 AM PT through 11/28/18 11:59 PM PT, or while supplies last. When you purchase a qualifying device on fi.google.com, you can redeem a travel gift card in the amount you paid for the device, excluding taxes (details below).

To qualify for this promotion, a device must be activated within 15 days of device shipment and remain active for 60 consecutive days within 75 days of device shipment. The device must be activated within the same plan that was used to purchase the device. Activation must be for full service (i.e., activation does not apply to a data-only SIM).

This offer is available for new Google Fi customers as of 11/28/18 12:00 AM PT and existing, active Google Fi customers. If the customer is new to Google Fi, the customer must transfer (port-in) their current personal number over to Google Fi during sign up. The number being transferred must be currently active and have been active with the previous carrier and the customer since 8/28/18 12:00 AM PT.

After the terms have been satisfied, the customer will receive an email from Google Fi (around 75 – 90 days after device activation) with instructions on how to obtain a gift card from Tango subject to Tango’s terms and conditions. The user can redeem gift card amounts with select travel partners: Airbnb, Delta Airlines, Hotels.com, and Southwest Airlines. Gift cards may also be subject to the terms of the travel partners.

If Fi service is paused for more than 7 days or cancelled within 120 days of activation, the value of the gift card will be charged to your Google Payments account to match the purchased price of the device. Limit one per person. This offer is only available for U.S. residents ages 18 and older, and requires Google Payments and Google Fi accounts. Unless otherwise stated, this offer cannot be combined with other offers. Offer and gift card redemption are not transferable, and are not valid for cash or cash equivalent. Void where prohibited.

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Last minute Cyber Monday deals

Listen, I know you’re tired of deals. I get it. You already woke up at 1AM on Black Friday to head to Best Buy in your pajama pants. But if we just stick together and follow the rules, we’ll get through the holiday gift season in one piece. We got this.

What follows is far from a comprehensive list of the deals you’ll be able to find online today, but should help you get started on your holiday shopping — or just pick up a little something for yourself, if you’re so inclined.

–Ring Video Doorbell 2 ($60 off) – As always, Amazon’s flooding Cyber Monday with deals on its own devices. At 30-percent, with a third-gen Echo Dot thrown in, the Ring doorbell just might be the best of the bunch.

–Buy a Samsung Galaxy, get an Echo Show free – Amazon’s also got some deep discounts on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, S9 and S9+, with bundled Echo devices thrown in for good measure. Sorry Bixby.

–Apple iPad ($80 off) – Walmart’s got a bunch of deals on Apple products — while supplies last.

–Apple Watch Series 3 ($50 off) – Sure it’s not the latest version — but it’s still a solid deal for the holidays.

–Fitbit Ionic ($70 off) – The Versa is admittedly the better of Fitbit’s new smartwatches, but $70 off is a solid deal for the larger device. 

–GoPro Hero7 ($70 off) – A solid discount for the leading action cam. 

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Samsung apologizes, promises compensation for factory conditions

Weeks after reaching a settlement, Samsung issued an apology over factory conditions leading to the illness and death of workers. “We offer our sincere apology to our workers who have suffered with illnesses and their families,” executive Kinam Kim said during a press conference late last week.

The apology is the result of longstanding health complaints levied against the company’s LCD and chip manufacturing lines, resulting in dozens of employees suffering illnesses including brain tumors and leukemia, according to The Associated Press.

An advocacy group had been fighting on behalf of workers after the 2007 death of one employee from leukemia. In addition to the public apology, Samsung will pay up to ~$133,000 per employee, for illness contracted from working conditions, including miscarriages and cancers in workers’ children.

In its apology, Samsung called previous efforts “insufficient,” promising to improve working conditions going forward. The electronics giant has promised to issue compensation for workers by 2028.

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A closer look at Royole’s foldable display

You’d be forgiven if Royole doesn’t ring any bells. Even here China, it’s far from a household name. Still, the Shanghai-based startup recently secured an undisclosed Series E, vaulting its valuation to an apparent $5 billion, up from $3 billion in late 2016.

Founded in 2012, Royole’s best-known release was a wearable cinema display. That changed last month, however, when it surprised the industry by announcing the imminent arrival of the FlexPai, a flexible screen smartphone that appears on track to to beat the Samsung Galaxy X to market.

The FlexPai’s anticipated December release seemingly came out of nowhere. Like competitors, Royole had shown off its proprietary folding technology as part of a standalone demos, but it hadn’t teased the arrival of a smartphone until the device was ready to ship. It’s a far cry, certainly, from the not ready for prime time prototype Samsung marched out on stage last month.

At an event in Shenzhen, CEO Bill Liu told TechCrunch that the company was built around the desire to bring the technology to market. “We started from the flexible displays and flexible sensors,” he explained. “We started the company with a focus on the flexible displays and sensors. And then along the way, we realized this could be a huge application for the technology.”

A foldable smartphone was simply the first product that made sense for the underlying tech. With development dating back a half-dozen year, Royole was the first to achieved the industry’s long standing goal of delivering a foldable screen — beating even the massive Samsung to market.

Being first isn’t always a blessing in this industry, but it’s an impressive feat, nonetheless. The FlexPai is real. I can’t speak to the scalability of the product, until it actually starts shipping out next month, but I can attest to the fact that at least one of the things exists in the world. I held it in my hands. I folded it. It worked.

It’s a difficult problem and Royole solved it with in-house technologies. No one can take that away from the company. I can’t say my initial apprehensions were ultimately dissuaded, however. The FlexPai mostly works as desired, but the execution isn’t what ultimately the kind of premium product one would expect, given the ultra-premium price tag (around $1,300 American).

Liu happily dropped the phone a couple of times on stage, in an attempt to put to rest any durability question. While the display ultimately didn’t crack or scratch, the flexible material looks almost like cellophane and sports crinkles that catch the light — the clarity also leaves something to be desire.

As far as portability, it’s true that you can fold it up and stuff it in your pocket, though it’s pretty chunky when you do so. Ultimately, these are first generation products — and likely a result of a company pushing to be first to market, knowing full well that companies like Samsung were breathing down its neck.

Royole sees potential to license the technology out for other categories. “Right now for the smartphone industry, we haven’t done any licensing,” said Liu. “For industrial applications like automotive or media, we do have customers. We sell the licenses to them, and we’ve already sold a lot of licenses.”

The company will also be working with developers to create content for the new form factor, with a $30 million program it launched last month. The Chinese version is due out in December.

 

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MetaCert’s Cryptonite can catch phishing links in your email

MetaCert, founded by Paul Walsh, originally began as a way to watch chat rooms for fake Ethereum scams. Walsh, who was an early experimenter in cryptocurrencies, grew frustrated when he saw hackers dumping fake links into chat rooms, resulting in users regularly losing cash to scammers.

Now Walsh has expanded his software to email. A new product built for email will show little green or red shields next to links, confirming that a link is what it appears to be. A fake link would appear red while a real PayPal link, say, would appear green. The plugin works with Apple’s Mail app on the iPhone and is called Cryptonite.

“The system utilizes the MetaCert Protocol infrastructure/registry,” said Walsh. “It contains 10 billion classified URLs. This is at the core of all of MetaCert’s products and services. It’s a single API that’s used to protect over 1 million crypto people on Telegram via a security bot and it’s the same API that powers the integration that turned off phishing for the crypto world in 2017. Even when links are shortened? MetaCert unfurls them until it finds the real destination site, and then checks the Protocol to see if it’s verified, unknown or classified as phishing. It does all this in less that 300ms.”

Walsh is also working on a system to scan for Fake News in the wild using a similar technology to his anti-phishing solution. The company is raising currently and is working on a utility token.

Walsh sees his first customers as enterprise and expects IT shops to implement the software to show employees which links are allowed, i.e. company or partner links, and which ones are bad.

“It’s likely we will approach this top down and bottom up, which is unusual for enterprise security solutions. But ours is an enterprise service that anyone can install on their phone in less than a minute,” he said. “SMEs isn’t typically a target market for email security companies but we believe we can address this massive market with a solution that’s not scary to setup and expensive to support. More research is required though, to see if our hypothesis is right.”

“With MetaCert’s security, training is reduced to a single sentence ‘if it doesn’t have a green shield, assume it’s not safe,’ ” said Walsh.

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Samsung’s dual-screen folding phone is very strange and probably doomed

Let me just say that I love the idea of a folding phone/tablet device. I was a Courier fanboy when Microsoft floated that intriguing but abortive concept device, and I’m all for unique form factors and things that bend. But Samsung’s first real shot at a folding device is inexplicable and probably dead on arrival. I’d like to congratulate the company for trying something new, but this one needed a little more time in the oven.

I haven’t used it, of course, so this is just my uninformed opinion (provided for your edification). But this device is really weird, and not in a good way. It’s a really thick phone with big bezels around a small screen that opens up into a small tablet. No one wants that!

Think about it. Why do you want a big screen?

If it’s for media, like most people, consider that nearly all that media is widescreen now, either horizontal (YouTube and Netflix) or vertical (Instagram and Facebook). You can switch between these views at will extremely easily. Now consider that because of basic geometry, the “big” screen inside this device will likely not be able to show that media much, if any, larger than the screen on the front!

(Well, in this device’s case, maybe a little, but only because that front display’s bezel really is huge. Why do you think they turned the lights off? Look where the notification bar is!)

It’s like putting two of the tall screens next to each other. You end up with one twice as wide, but that’s pretty much what you get if you put the phone on its side. All you gain with the big screen is a whole lot of letterboxing or windowboxing. Oh, and probably about three quarters of an inch of thickness and half a pound of weight. This thing is going to be a beast.

Power users may also want a big screen for productivity: email and document handling and such is great on a big device like a Galaxy Note. Here then is opportunity for a folding tablet to excel (so to speak). You can just plain fit more words and charts and controls on there. Great! But if the phone is geared toward power users, why even have the small screen on the front anyway if any time that user wants to engage with the phone they will “open” it up? For quick responses or dismissing notifications, maybe, but who would really want that? That experience will always be inferior to the one the entire device is designed around.

I would welcome a phone that was only a book-style big internal screen, and I don’t think it would be a bother to flip it open when you want to use it. Lots of people with giant phones keep book-like covers on their devices anyway! It would be great to be able to use those square inches for the display rather than credit card slots or something.

The Courier had tons of great ideas on how to use two screens.

There are also creative ways to use the screen: left and right halves are different apps; top half is compose and bottom is keyboard; left half is inbox and right half is content; top half is media and bottom is controls and comments. Those sprang to mind faster than I could type them.

On the other hand, I can’t think of any way that a “front” display could meaningfully interact with or enhance a secondary (or is it primary?) display that will never be simultaneously visible. Presumably you’ll use one or the other at any given time, meaning you literally can’t engage the entire capability of the device.

You know what would be cool? A device like this that also used the bezel display we’ve seen on existing Galaxy devices. How cool would it be to have your phone closed like a book, but with an always-on notification strip (or two!) on the lip, telling you battery, messages and so on? And maybe if you tapped once the device would automatically pop open physically! That would be amazing! And Samsung is absolutely the company that I’d say would make it.

Instead, they made this thing.

It’s disappointing to me not just because I don’t like the device as they’ve designed it, but because I think the inevitable failure of the phone will cool industry ambition regarding unique devices like it. That’s wrong, though! People want cool new things. But they also want them to make sense.

I’m looking forward to how this technology plays out, and I fully expect to own a folding phone some time in the next few years. But this first device seems to me like a major misstep, and one that will set back that flexible future rather than advance it.

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Here’s what Samsung’s wacky folding phone looks like in action

As rumored, Samsung showed off a prototype of a folding display today. Folded, it’s a smartphone. Unfolded, it’s a tablet. Neat!

Less neat: The company sort of went out of its way to not really show very much. A prototype was onstage for about 45 seconds, and it was deliberately backlit to be intensely silhouetted. They “disguised the elements of the design” to keep secret whatever secret sauce they have.

Finding that clip of the prototype folding/unfolding means digging through Samsung’s two-hour developer keynote, so we went ahead and GIF’d it up for you.

Here’s what it looks like going from phone mode to tablet mode:

And from tablet mode back to a more pocket-friendly phone mode:

While this isn’t the first folding phone we’ve seen , it also won’t be the last. With Google officially adding support for folding displays into Android as of this morning, it sounds like they’ve got reason to think a number of manufacturers are dabbling with this concept — enough of them, at least, to make it worthwhile to wire these changes into the main Android codebase.

If you want to see the relevant bit of the Samsung keynote for yourself, it starts juuuust before the 1 hour and 25 minute mark in the stream embedded below:

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Samsung shares a glimpse of its folding ‘Infinity Flex Display’ smartphone

After hyping its unveil of its long-rumored folding smartphone, Samsung kind of delivered an announcement, revealing a dual-screen folding phone prototype.

“How can we make the screen bigger without actually increasing the size of the device itself?” a Samsung exec posited onstage.

The company showcased a prototype of its “Infinity Flex Display,” a device that can be unfolded. In a pitch black room, a company exec showcased the device, which was housed in a larger case to “obscure the form factor.” There’s a conventional outer display on the front with a fairly low screen-to-body ration, but when you unfold the phone, there’s a massive 7.3″ display on the inside.

It’s a bit surprising that the folding display is on the inside of the phone rather than the outside edge, though I’m sure it’s much easier for the company to build a reliable display if the actual folding part of the screen doesn’t have to account for the entire side of the phone.

When you open the phone, your open apps will move from the front display to the tablet-sized display, functionality only possible thanks to some updates to Android.

Google is adding Android support for foldable screens

It’s clear that despite hyping this “innovation,” Samsung isn’t quite ready to release a device of this type yet. The company says it will start mass production of the new display type in the coming months. The company teased more announcements surrounding the device at the next Samsung Unpacked event in 2019.

Whether this is the future of the phablet or not, it’s certainly an evolution of the smartphone form factor. Samsung believes that the folding display is the “foundation of the smartphone of tomorrow,” but whether there’s more beyond the gimmick certainly wasn’t clarified today.

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Google is adding Android support for foldable screens

Big day for developer events. As Samsung was on stage getting ready to talk about its upcoming foldable phone, Google spilled the beans a bit at its own Android Developer Summit. The company briefly detailed plans bake support for folding phones into the mobile operating system.

Support for the nascent technology is going to be tough, given what’s expected to be a variety of different form factors, so Google’s been working with hardware partners. It’s first, naturally, is  Samsung. The two companies have been working closely on a device it plans to launch “early next year,” according to Google. That device is expected to debut moments from now on Samsung’s own stage.

Google is referring to the category as “Foldables.”

We just announced support for foldables at #AndroidDevSummit, a new form factor coming next year from Android partners.

Android apps run seamlessly as the device folds, achieving this form factor's chief feature: screen continuity. pic.twitter.com/NAfOmCOY26

— Android Developers (@AndroidDev) November 7, 2018

“You can think of the device as both a phone and a tablet,” Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke explained. “Broadly, there are two variants – two-screen devices and one-screen devices. When folded, it looks like phone, fitting in your pocket or purse. The defining feature for this form factor is something we call screen continuity. ”

Among the addition here is the ability to flag app to respond to the screen as it folds and unfolds — the effect would likely be similar to response of applications as handsets switch between portrait and landscape modes.

While Samsung’s is the most prominent, the company company’s Foldable isn’t expected to be the first to market. That honor will like go to Royole’s FlexPai device, though that handset has already been knocked for build quality ahead of launch. Whatever the case, Samsung’s certainly not going to be alone here, but it will almost certainly be a market leader.

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Samsung opens its Bixby assistant to developers

Samsung has been suffering through a lot of catch-up in the voice assistant race, but at its annual developer conference the company placed a major emphasis on how it’s expanding the scale and effectiveness of its Bixby assistant.

The company announced that Bixby would be coming to more devices and more languages with third-party developers finally gaining access to building functionality for the AI assistant.

“For the first time we are opening Bixby to all of you, our developers,” Samsung EVP Eui-Suk Chung announced onstage.

The company is pledging to bring the assistant to watches, refrigerators, tablets, washing machines and more, and in the coming months will be adding support for five additional languages. While these promises seemed to sit a bit further down the line, the company was ready to talk about their Bixby developer kit during the keynote.

The company announced the release of the Bixby Developer Studio, a set of dev tools that’s “way ahead of the other guys,” Viv Labs CEO/ Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus told the crowd. The company will also be introducing Bixby Marketplace, a home for users to discover the new functionality of their voice assistant.

Bixby may have a long road ahead to catch up with other companies, but third-party integrations are something that none of the major voice assistant platforms have nailed. If Samsung can continue to invest in the platform and court developers with sophisticated tools, they may have bette luck in gaining third-party integrations that feel more ancillary.

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Samsung’s social logo teases a folding phone ahead of announcement

All of the major players have held events over the past few months, but hardware season still has a few last gasps left. The Samsung Developer Conference happening this week in San Francisco isn’t likely to be a major launching pad for consumer electronics, but the company is expected to offer a glimpse into what’s to come.

Samsung’s long been a fan of teasing out big news ahead of launch, and all subtly has gone out the window with the folding logo the company’s adopted on social media. A report from Bloomberg later backed up by The Wall Street Journal has the company showing off a prototype of a phone with a foldable display this week.

The company is said to still be debating the specifics of the hardware at this late stage, and the product may only be glimpsed at in the form of an on-screen render or prototype. For Samsung, the key is showing the world that it’s continuing to innovate after a lukewarm critical reception on its last couple of devices.

The company likely won’t be first to market with the screen folding tech. That honor will likely go to the Royole Corporation’s FlexPai handset, which is due out before the end of the year. Though from the looks of it, it won’t leave the best first impression.

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Samsung’s Bixby may finally get more third-party integration soon

Poor Bixby. We admittedly haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about Samsung’s smart assistant since launch — but that’s not for lack of potential. The company has promised great things since day one, but has been slow to deliver on, well, just about everything.

Third-party integration was supposed to be one of Bixby’s biggest selling points, but in the year and a half since launch, Samsung hasn’t offered a lot on that front. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the hardware giant will shed more light on its plans at next week’s Samsung Developer Conference, with the launch of third-party “capsules.”

On the face of it, at least, the offerings sound fairly similar to the skills and actions we’ve seen on the competition, letting devs build their own custom responses. It’s something Samsung will really need to push if products like the upcoming Galaxy Home premium smart speaker are going to find any sort of market.

The HomePod competitor already looks like a tough sell as Samsung makes a steep climb further into the burgeoning smart home market, and high-profile partnerships are going to be an important key to breaking in. Speaking of tricky propositions, the Journal story also reconfirms previous rumors Samsung will be showing off a folding phone at next week’s event.

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Samsung reportedly debating foldable phone form factor and the S10’s headphone jack

Samsung’s foldable phone has been floating around the company under the codename “Winner” for some time now. That bit of info isn’t new. It’s understandably taken the company a while to get the thing just right.

After all, we’re talking a new paradigm here in terms of form factor. It’s an exciting process, indeed — and a code a LOT of companies have been trying to crack. According to a new report from Bloomberg, however, some of the heel dragging with regard to decision making on that front is really coming down to the wire here.

The Samsung Developer Conference, happening next month in San Francisco, could be the big debut for the long-awaited product. From the sound of the report, however, we’re going to see little more than a “conceptual image” of the product, rather than a retail device or even prototype.

That means, of course, that we can probably rule out any possibility that the company is going to attempt to jam this thing out for the holidays. The unveil would be more of a check in to let the world know that the product is, indeed, still in the works, and big innovation is just around the corner. Winners don’t just happen overnight, you know.

Screen orientation is reportedly a sticking point here, with the company ultimately opting for a design that opens like an old school flip phone. Samsung is said to be working with Google on a custom version of Android that can handle the new design language — similar to what LG did with Android wear on its new hybrid watch. There are also some concerns around mass production. The phrase “The screen, when it cracks, shatters like dried paper” doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence here.

As reported earlier, Samsung’s next flagship, the S10 will sport an in-screen fingerprint reader (a similar feature is also coming on the soon to launch OnePlus 6T). More surprisingly, the company is also “toying” with dropping the headphone jack on the device. While it’s true the decision feels like an inevitability, Samsung has roundly mocked Apple’s decision for years now.

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