Samsung targets iPad Pro with the Galaxy Tab S6

Once again, the rumors proved to be true, with Samsung going straight from the S4 to S6 for its premium tier. Vaguely confusing naming conventions aside (there’s also the lower cost S5E), the company’s got another solid entry on its hands, going after the same slice of creatives targeted by the iPad Pro and various Surface devices.

The company buried the lede a bit here. The top level feature is almost certainly the addition of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The 855 marks a nice bump the S4’s 835 (and even more so the S5E’s 670) — good news as the company is no doubt hoping the product will do double duty, inhabiting that increasingly blurry space between tablet and laptop. The 7,040mAh battery, meanwhile, promises up to 15 hours of life on a charge.

The S Pen comes standard — a nice touch, especially for the $649 price point. Mind you, that’s already a few hundred bucks cheaper than the entry level iPad Pro. The stylus charges wireless, attaching magnetically to the rear of the device, so you’re less likely to misplace it. And, more importantly, won’t accidentally break the whole thing by sticking it in backwards — truly the most humiliating of defeats.

The magnetic connection is pretty weak, compared to the iPad Pro’s sides. Though the new case has a clever concave slot for the S Pen, helping it stay in place while on. I also didn’t love the feel of the S4’s keyboard, so I’m happy to see what’s new there.

The S Pen does your standard array of stylus things, and as with the Note line, Samsung is working to make it more of a kitchen sink productivity accessory. That includes the ability to use it as a kind of bluetooth remote for advancing slide presentations and snapping videos and taking selfies. According to Samsung, people taking photos with tablets is very much a thing, and you might as well get used to it.

In fact, the rear camera actually gets an overhaul here. Samsung’s gone dual camera with a wide lens — noting that the S6 is its first tablet to offer that functionality. The wide angle lens offers a 123 degree angle — roughly the equivalent of what the human eye offers. As with other mobile devices from the company, AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure you get better shots, offering scene optimization with the built-in Neural Processing Unit.

One thing the S6 offers that the iPad Pro (and for that matter, the iPhone) doesn’t is an on-screen fingerprint reader. It’s an optical scanner, however, instead of the ultrasonic offered on the Galaxy S10 (and, one assumes, the forthcoming Note 10). Samsung says the less advanced scanner was a matter of space issues — an odd concern, given the much larger real estate we’re dealing with here.

Speaking of real estate, that’s a 10.5 inch Super AMOLED display and a fairly slim 5.7 millimeter body — thinner and lighter than the S4. The multimedia offering is filled out with a quartet of Dolby Atmos speakers tuned by Samsung’s own AKG.

Samsung continues to push DeX as a key part of its workflow. In fact, there’s now a DeX function key right on the case’s keyboard. DeX offers a more desktop like software experience on the table for improved multitasking. Now you can do stuff like opening multiple windows from the same app — bringing it more inline with what Apple is trying to do with iPadOS.

The company’s also partnered with Discord for an exclusive desktop Game Launcher — not doubt in a bid to offer something inline with Apple’s forthcoming Arcade. The Discord dealie is coming to Samsung tablets next month.

Preorders on the WiFi unit start August 23, starting at $649 for a unit with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Another $80 will get you a version with 8GB of RAM and double the storage. Early preorders will get the keyboard cover for half off when bundled with the tablet. There’s also an LTE model coming later this year.

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Vizio rolls out its Apple AirPlay and HomeKit integrations to its SmartCast TV platform

Ahead of Apple launching its big video streaming initiative Apple TV+ this autumn, a integration is going live today that brings Apple closer to working with third-party TV makers and making its services available on a wider array of devices. Today Vizio said it would start to roll out support for AirPlay2 and HomeKit to its SmartCast TV sets, making it possible to stream video and other media from Apple devices to its TVs and control the sets using Apple’s Home app and through its Siri voice assistant.

The support is coming by way of an over-the-air update to SmartCast 3.0, the system that underpins Vizio’s smart TVs. Notably, using the Apple services will not necessarily mean buying new Vizio TVs: the service is backwards compatible to TVs dating back to 2016. New sets range in prices from $259.99 to $3,499.99.

“SmartCast 3.0 is full of added value for VIZIO customers. With both AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support, users can now share movies, TV shows, music and more from their favorite apps, including the Apple TV app, directly to SmartCast TVs, and enable TV controls through the Home app and Siri,” said Bill Baxter, Chief Technology Officer, VIZIO. “We are thrilled to offer an even more compelling value proposition to our users with a smart TV experience that supports all three major voice assistants. This broad range of compatibility enables VIZIO SmartCast to seamlessly integrate into any household with Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa – giving users more ways to sit back and enjoy the entertainment they love.” Vizio still appears to be the only smart TV maker that’s offering support on its sets for all of the major voice assistants.

Vizio’s integration for Apple’s media services was first announced in January at CES, when Vizio said it would be getting actually rolled out later in the year.

The news was notable at the time for a couple of reasons. First, it underscored how Vizio was stepping up its growth efforts after a tough couple of years involving lawsuits, regulatory investigations and a failed M&A attempt.

Second, it was part of a bigger theme of Apple branching out into a wider consumer electronics ecosystem for its push into the world of TV and video. The latter still stands in stark contrast to Apple’s approach around smartphones, computers and watches, where it has spent years building hardware, operating systems and walled gardens.

That’s a story that is still playing out. The timing of the Vizio news is notable given that it’s just one day after Apple’s quarterly earnings report, where the company revealed a solid quarter that beat analyst expectations but also continued to show slowing growth, largely on the back of an ongoing decline in unit sales for the iPhone (amid a similar, bigger market trend for smarphones overall). To offset that story, Apple has been working hard to build new product categories in newer hardware areas like wearables (the Apple Watch) and smart home hubs (HomePod), and Services, which includes Apple’s efforts in areas like video and music (

Services came in at $11.455 billion — missing analysts expections but still growing 13% on a year ago. The promise — or perhaps more accurately, the hope — is that adding TV and gaming into the mix later in the year will boost that even more. This is where integrations such as the one getting announced today with Vizio will fit in: they will help expand the number of people who might be using the services, and of course the number of screens where the content can be consumed.

Vizio does not specify how many sets it currently has in the market — last number it gave me earlier in the year was “millions” — but it generally is behind Samsung, which currently leads in the smart TV category.

It notes that the service will work by way of tapping an AirPlay icon within SmartCast to be able to stream 4K and Dolby VisionTM HDR movies and TV shows from Apple TV, along with other AirPlay-compatible video apps. Mirroring (which you can also do with non-smart TVs) will also be supported. AirPlay 2 also lets users play content across multiple rooms (provided you have the sets, HomePods or other AirPlay 2 speakers installed).

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Samsung posts 55.6% drop in second-quarter profit as it copes with weak demand and a trade dispute

As it forecast earlier this month, Samsung reported a steep drop in its second-quarter earnings due to lower market demand for chips and smartphones. The company said its second-quarter operating profit fell 55.6% year-over-year to 6.6 trillion won (about $5.6 billion), on consolidated revenue of 56.13 trillion won, slightly above the guidance it issued three weeks ago.

Last quarter, Samsung also reported that its operating profit had dropped by more than half. The same issues that hit its earnings during the first quarter of this year have continued, including lower memory prices as major datacenter customers adjust their inventory, meaning they are currently buying less chips (the weak market also impacted competing semiconductor maker SK Hynix’s quarterly earnings).

Samsung reported that its chip business saw second-quarter operating profit drop 71% year-over-year to 3.4 trillion won, on consolidated revenue of 16.09 trillion won. In the second half of the year, the company expects to continue dealing with market uncertainty, but says demand for chips will increase “on strong seasonality and adoption of higher-density products.”

Meanwhile, Samsung’s mobile business reported a 42% drop in operating profit from a year ago to 1.56 trillion won, on 25.86 trillion won in consolidated revenue. The company said its smartphone shipments increased quarter-over-quarter thanks to strong sales of its budget Galaxy A series. But sales of flagship models fell, due to “weak sales momentum for the Galaxy S10 and stagnant demand for premium products.”

Samsung expects the mobile market to remain lackluster, but it will continue adding to both its flagship and mass-market lineups. It is expected to unveil the Note 10 next month and a new release date for the delayed Galaxy Fold, along with new A series models in the second half of the year.

“The company will promptly respond to the changing business environment, and step up efforts to secure profitability by enhancing efficiency across development, manufacturing and marketing operations,” Samsung said in its earnings release.

It’s not just market demand that’s impacting Samsung’s earnings. Along with other tech companies, Samsung is steeling itself for the long-term impact of a trade dispute between Japan and South Korea. Last month, Japan announced that it is placing export restrictions on some materials used in chips and smartphones. Samsung said it still has stores of those materials, but it is also looking for alternatives since it is unclear how long the dispute between the two countries may last (and it could last for a long time).

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Week in Review: Regulation boogaloo

Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

Last week, I talked about how services like Instagram had moved beyond letting their algorithms take over the curation process as they tested minimizing key user metrics such as “like” counts on the platform.

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John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The big story

The big news stories this week intimately involved the government poking its head into the tech industry. What was clear between the two biggest stories, the DoJ approving the Sprint/T-Mobile merger and the FTC giving Facebook a $5 billion slap on the wrist, is that big tech has little to worry about its inertia being contained.

It seems the argument from Spring and T-Mobile that it was better to have three big telecom companies in the U.S. rather than two contenders and two pretenders, seems to have stuck. Similarly, Facebook seems to have done a worthy job of indicating that it will handle the complicated privacy stuff but that they’ll let the government orgs see what they’re up to.

9 reasons the Facebook FTC settlement is a joke

Fundamentally, none of these orgs seem to want to harm the growth of these American tech companies and I have a tough time believing that perspective is going to magically get more toothy in some of these early antitrust investigations. The government might be making a more concerted effort to understand how these businesses are structured, but even focusing solely on something like the cloud businesses of Microsoft, Google and Amazon, I have little doubt that the government is going to spend an awfully long time in the observation phase.

The danger is erraticism and for that the worst government fear for tech isn’t a three-letter agency, it’s the Twitter ramblings of POTUS.

Trump threatens Apple with tariffs, Google with investigation on Twitter

feedback -> @lucasmtny

Onto the rest of the week’s news.

(Photo: ALASTAIR PIKE,THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Apple dropping $1 billion on Intel’s modem business
  Apple is snapping up a missing link in its in-house component production with the $1B purchase of most of Intel’s modem business. This follows a dramatic saga between Intel, Qualcomm and Apple over the past year, but Apple will be making its own smartphone modems the question is when they actually end up in new iPhones. Read more here.
• Microsoft dropping $1 billion on OpenAI
  Microsoft announced this week that it is dumping $1 billion into Sam Altman’s OpenAI research group. The partnership is pretty major, but it’s just one of the interesting avenues Microsoft is using to ensure its Azure services gain notable customers. Read more here.
• Galaxy Fold is coming back!
  After a very embarrassing soft launch, Samsung which managed to make it a several devices beyond the Note 7 before another garbage fire is trying its hand at the Galaxy Fold again and will be releasing it sometime in September. It seems like the carriers are a little dubious of the prospect and T-Mobile has already opted out of carrying it. Read more here.

GAFA Gaffes [Facebook Edition!!]

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook gets five:
   [Facebook settles with FTC: $5 billion and new privacy guarantees]
2. FTC isn’t quite done with Facebook:
   [Facebook says it’s under antitrust investigation by the FTC]
3. Facebook dismissed CA warnings:
   [Facebook ignored staff warnings about sketchy Cambridge Analytica in September 2015]
4. Facebook left kids vulnerable:
   [Facebook fails to keep Messenger Kids safety promise]

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. This week, my colleague Danny spoke with some top VCs about why fintech startups have been raising massive amounts of cash and he seemed to walk away with some interesting impressions.

Why fintech VC mega rounds have become so common

“…The biggest challenge that has faced fintech companies for years — really, the industry’s consistent Achilles’ heel — is the cost of acquiring a customer. Financial customer relationships are incredibly valuable, and the cost of acquiring a user for any product is among the most expensive in every major channel.

And those costs are going up…”

Here are some of our other top reads for premium subscribers.

• The roles tools play in employee engagement
• Which types of startups are most often profitable
• What to watch for in a VC term sheet

We’re excited to announce The Station, a new TechCrunch newsletter all about mobility. Each week, in addition to curating the biggest transportation news, Kirsten Korosec will provide analysis, original reporting and insider tips. Sign up here to get The Station in your inbox beginning in August.

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Lessons from the hardware capital of the world

A week is obviously not enough time to truly understand a market as massive and fascinating as China. Hell, it’s not really even enough time to adjust to the 12-hour time difference from New York. That said, each of the three visits I’ve taken to the country in the past two years has yielded some useful insights into my role as hardware editor here at TechCrunch.

Late last week, I got back from an eight-day trip to Shenzhen in the Guangdong Province of South China and nearby Hong Kong. In some respects, the cities are worlds apart, though a newly opened high-speed rail system has reduced the trip to 30 minutes. Customs issues aside, it’s the height of convenience. Though for political and cultural reasons I’ll not get into here, some have bemoaned the access it’s provided.

This particular visit was sort of a scouting trip. In November, TechCrunch will be hosting its first Hardware Battlefield event in a couple of years. Previous events had been held at CES for reasons of easy access to young startups. This time out, however, we’ve opted to go straight to the source.

The birthplace of hardware

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Samsung readies Galaxy Fold for September release

When it was unveiled on stage, the Galaxy Fold was heralded as the next big thing. Samsung seeded units to reviews and prepared for launch. And then a funny thing happened on the way to a smartphone paradigm shift: it started breaking. Multiple review units were sent back to Samsung with busted screens.

It was a small sample size, to be sure. First Samsung blamed reviewers themselves. Ultimately, however, there was enough concern to cause the company to pump the breaks entirely. Now, nearly three months to the day after the device was set for release, Samsung’s finally got concrete information on the long delayed foldable. The company just announced a September (of 2019, presumably) launch date for the device. No concrete date just yet — but at least that’s better than the “coming weeks” line we’ve been hearing about timeframe for a few months now. 

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock

The fixes are pretty much what we’ve expected from the outset, but here’s the full breakdown straight from the company,

• The top protective layer of the Infinity Flex Display has been extended beyond the bezel, making it apparent that it is an integral part of the display structure and not meant to be removed.
• Galaxy Fold features additional reinforcements to better protect the device from external particles while maintaining its signature foldable experience:
• The top and bottom of the hinge area have been strengthened with newly added protection caps
• Additional metal layers underneath the Infinity Flex Display have been included to reinforce the protection of the display
• The space between the hinge and body of Galaxy Fold has been reduced.

The first bullet point is a direct response to those reviewers who peeled off the protective layer, thinking it was temporary. Again, Samsung put the onus on reviewers there, but ultimately shouldered the blame from a top layer that looked almost exactly like the laminate Galaxy devices ship with to avoid scratching. This fix hides those corners — and the temptation to peel them.

The next three, meanwhile, are reactions to a larger design flaw with the initial Fold, which allowed particles to fall between hinges. Once trapped behind the display, pressing the touchscreen would cause it to push up against the particles, damaging it in the process.

“Samsung has taken the time to fully evaluate the product design,” the company writes, “make necessary improvements and run rigorous tests to validate the changes we made.” The phone maker has, hopefully, learned a lessen from the Note 7 debacle from a few years back. After being too eager to get the product back to market, Samsung was ultimately forced to issue a second recall for the phablet and ultimately discontinued the product altogether.

This issue will likely have less of an impact on the company’s bottom line, as it was discovered before the product officially came to market. It has, however, been viewed by many as an indictment nascent foldables category. It was also apparently enough to cause Huawei to hit pause on the release of its own Mate X foldable, which has since been subject to additional rigorous tests.

A number of retailers have since canceled preorders. Likely the initial hiccup has also left many early adopters second guessing the decision to drop $2,000 on an unproven product. Samsung seemed ready for the Fold to be something of a niche product regardless, but the on-going saga could ultimately compound that.

More release details are being promised “closer to launch.” Turns out Samsung might have exactly the right stage for that big announcement a few weeks from now.

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India’s Haptik acqui-hires Los Angeles startup Convrg in international expansion push

Mumbai-based Haptik, which operates a conversational AI platform, has already won several high profile clients in India. Now the five-year-old firm, with newly found significant capital in the bank, is attempting to replicate its success in international markets.

On Tuesday, Haptik announced it has acqui-hired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in North America. The move is part of Haptik’s broader strategy to both expand its technology expertise and team and business overseas, Aakrit Vaish, cofounder and CEO of Haptik, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Founded in 2017, Convrg has made a name for itself by developing several popular chatbots and voice products. Its clients today include Reddit, The GRAMMYs, Aveda, Shopify, Sephora, and Proactiv. The startup had raised only a “small seed round” prior to today’s announcement, Vaish said, declining to reveal any financial details.

Convrg recently hired Timothy Carey, an industry veteran, who now serves as Haptik’s General Manager for the region. Convrg’s cofounders — Audrey Wu, Liz Snower and Amit Gupta — will report to Carey, who until recently held a similar position at IPSoft, another AI-driven firm.

Haptik, which sold majority stake to telecom operator Reliance Jio in a $100 million deal earlier this year, currently offers a chatbot platform. Many players including Coca Cola, Oyo, Samsung, Tata Group, and KFC use Haptik’s chatbots in their customer support services.

The firm has about 90% of its clients in India today, something it intends to change in the coming quarters. “60% of all software is bought in the U.S., so for us that market is critically important,” he said.

“We have done some business in the U.S. in the past, but now we really want to focus on expanding there,” he said. “For that, we need team and dedicated operation there. You can’t expand in the U.S. sitting in India, or on a plane.”

Vaish is already in talks with a handful of other startups and is open to more acquisitions, he said.

Other than that, the firm is currently exploring and developing voice bots as it expands its offerings. Voice bots would help it find more clients, such as those who handle customer services through phones, for instance.

When asked about what he thinks of major giants such as Google and Amazon also expanding into these fields, Vaish said these companies are largely making solutions for users — and not businesses. Besides, the chatbot space is so nascent currently that any effort from any giant helps educate the market, he said.

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GetAccept’s workflow and e-signature platform for sales secures $7M Series A funding

Many years ago every sales deal was sealed with a handshake between two people. Today, digitization has moved into the sales process, but it hasn’t necessarily improved the experience. In fact, it’s often become a more time-consuming affair because information and communications are scattered across multiple channels and the number of people involved in a deal has increased. That means lots of offers and quotes are get lost in the mix.

GetAccept a startup which provides an all-in-one sales platform where video, live chat, proposal design, document tracking and e-signatures come together to simplify the life of a sales team.

It’s now convinced investors there is such a need, raising a $7 million Series A funding round led by DN Capital, with participation from BootstrapLabs, Y Combinator and a number of Spotify’s early investors including ex-CFO of Spotify, Peter Sterky. The former CMO of Slack and Zendesk, Bill Macaitis, will also join the company’s Board of Directors.

The new capital will be used to scale sales and marketing, and accelerate product innovation for GetAccept’s industry leading document workflow solution for sales.

This round brings GetAccept’s total financing raised to $9M after then won their first seed round in 2017.

Samir Smajic, CEO, GetAccept says while CRM systems have made it easier for sales teams to manage pipeline and broker deals, “60 percent of all contracts are lost to indecision or simply go unanswered… Prospects no longer have to interact with reps to get basic information about a product or service, making the sales process highly impersonal. But prospects still need a rep to guide them through an increasingly complex B2B sales process in order to make better-informed buying decisions.” He believes GetAccept bridges this growing “engagement gap”.

GetAccept integrates into a company’s sales pipeline through technology partnerships with CRM and sales automation platforms including Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and others.

It’s pitched as an all-in-one sales platform which compete with several separate tools including well-financed solutions likeDocsend, Pandadoc, Showpad, Highspot, Docusign, and Adobe Sign. Their ‘sales pitch’ is that companies can do all of the things in those products but the single GetAccept platform is actually geared toward to sales reps and includes the important features that help sales reps to actually move deals forward.

“Getting a deal to the point of contract has become increasingly difficult because buyers now get most of their information online,” said Thomas Rubens, Partner at DN Capital. “GetAccept honed in on this growing issue early on and built a best-in-class platform for managing document workflow and engagement across the entire sales cycle.”

GetAccept has so far signed customers including Samsung, Stanley and Siemens. It’s also expanded to the US and EMEA including Norway, Denmark and France.

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Drifting champion tackles Goodwood with VR, 5G and one tiny startup’s tech

Stunt driver Vaughn Gittin Jr. took a Lincoln MKZ through its paces at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, drifting the vehicle and taking it up a signature hill climb. Except Gittin wasn’t in the car.

Donning a Samsung VR headset, Gittin was controlling the vehicle miles away from the Goodwood arena using a teleoperation system developed by Portland, Ore., startup Designated Driver and Vodafone’s 5G network.

The specially equipped Lincoln MKZ, dubbed the S-Drone, is sporting blacked-out windows. The eyes of the vehicle are the numerous Samsung Galaxy S10 5G phones mounted on the roof. Video is transmitted using Vodafone’s 5G network to the Designated Driver remote operating station. That’s where Gittin sits and controls the vehicle.

Typically, Designated Driver’s remote teleoperations driver would sit in front of six screens and use controls like a steering wheel and pedals to control the vehicle. This demonstration, which was held before the Goodwood event officially began Thursday, took it to the next level by adding virtual reality and the 5G network.

Gittin will stunt drive remotely on July 5 and throughout the weekend in the Goodwood Arena at FOS. Or you can watch a demonstration below.

The marketing around 5G can leave one indifferent to the technology. But 5G does hold a lot of promise for autonomous vehicles and teleoperations systems. Remote-controlling a vehicle requires instantaneous and constant flow of video and inputs from the vehicle. It simply won’t work safely or consistently if there’s even a second of lag time. A latency-free video connection is critical to properly executing such an operation.

“We’ve pioneered state of the art teleops technology by leveraging 5G,” Designated Driver CEO Manuela Papadopol said. “We’re proud to push boundaries for mobility.”

The demonstration at Goodwood aims to show how 5G can erase those concerns and become a critical technology for safety-critical applications like remote driving a vehicle. It’s also the latest test of Designated Driver’s tech. The startup recently remotely controlled a vehicle at Goodwood from its offices in Portland, Ore., some 5,000 miles and an ocean away. The company believes this was the world’s first transatlantic teleoperations demonstration.

This techcentric demonstration might seem out of place at the annual hill climb event, where human-driven vehicles wind their way through narrow hay and brick-lined passages. The future is trickling into this historic event. Last year, Roborace became the first self-driving vehicle to successfully complete the hill climb, albeit with a bit more caution than the human-driven vehicles.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Fold problems are reportedly fixed — so now what?

In a recent interview, Samsung CEO DJ Koh noted that the company was hard at work on Galaxy Fold fixes (he also said people won’t be using smartphones in five years, so who knows?). And now, a report from Bloomberg confirms that the company has put the finishing touches on those fixes two months after the handset was originally set to debut.

So now what? We still don’t have a date. We’ve been seeing promises that a firmer timeline for release would arrive in “coming weeks” for what seems like months now. But those “people familiar with the matter” who told the site that the phone is finally read for prime time aren’t offering any additional info on timeframe.

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock

Instead, it looks like the company’s plans are to — at very least — have its first foldable available in time for the holidays. At just under $2,000, that’s a pretty hefty ask for a stocking stuffer. Given that Samsung has now officially confirmed its Note 10 event for August 7, it might well just wait for that big show to confirm the release date — especially if we’re not expecting the see it hit retail until Q4.

Samsung’s been through worse, of course. The Note 7 debacle was a bigger black eye both in terms of timing and scope. But the initial spate of problems with the handset felt like as much of an indictment of the category as Samsung’s methods. Even Huawei used it as an opportunity to put its Mate X through more rigorous testing. Whatever the case, the revolution is going to take even longer to unfold than expected.

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Smartphone users are upgrading less frequently — will 5G help?

A new study out of NPD confirms what we already know about the state of the smartphone in 2019. People just aren’t upgrading as frequently. You can see the ramifications of this as companies like Apple and Google scramble to right the ship. Still, it’s nice to put some numbers to the abstract trend.

The analyst firm conducted a study of 3,650 U.S, based cellphone users earlier this year and found that a quarter held onto their previous device for more than three years. That represents an 18 percent increase from two years prior. Twenty-nine percent, meanwhile, have had their current device for two or more years.

Upgrade cycles have slowed, and you can thank higher prices, fewer exciting features and, frankly, better devices for that. In that last sense, at least, smartphone manufactures have kind of painted themselves into a corner on this one. Companies were surely aware that the whole thing was going to plateau and decline eventually, though many have been seemingly caught off-guard by how quickly and severely it has happened.

5G is a bright spot, of course. NPD says ~2/3rds of consumers are aware of the technology (a number that has almost certainly increased since the second half of last year, when the number was collected), and around one-third are “interested” in purchasing such a device. Promising, but I’m also “interested” in purchasing a major league baseball team, so maybe take that bit with a grain or two of salt.

We’re seeing the first few handsets trickle through from companies like Samsung, LG and Motorola, along with some spotty coverage around the U.S. Of course, that’s going to have to be much more ubiquitous before the technology becomes a tangible driver of new handset adoption.

5G is certainly destined to be the next major driving feature in the category — particularly with foldables currently in a somewhat depressing state of limbo. But if company are hoping it will turn around their fortunes entirely, I’ve got some of Trump’s 6G spectrum to sell them.

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Samsung shuts down its AI-powered Mall shopping app in India

Samsung has quietly discontinued an app that it built specifically for India, one of its largest markets and where it houses a humongous research and development team. The AI-powered Android app, called Samsung Mall, was positioned to help users identify objects around them and locate it on shopping sites to make the purchase.

The company has shut down the app a year and a half after its launch. Samsung Mall was exclusively available for select company handsets and was launched alongside the Galaxy On7 Prime smartphone. News blog TizenHelp was first to report about the development.

At the time of the launch, Samsung said the Mall app will complement features of Bixby, the company’s virtual assistant. Bixby already offers a functionality that allows users to identify objects through photos — but does let them make the purchase.

“The first insight while developing Samsung Mall was that consumers may be looking to find the price, the colour, delivery options and a lot of other things. Indian consumers want to find the best deals first. They aren’t tied up with one particular portal as well,” Sanjay Razdan, Director of Samsung India told local outlet India Today at the time of the launch.

Samsung had partnered with Amazon, Shopclues and TataCLiQ to show relevant results from these retailers on its “one-stop online experience” app. Users were also able to compare prices to see which website was offering them the item at lowest cost.

Samsung Mall app was downloaded about five million times from Google Play Store in India since March 2018, Randy Nelson, Head of Mobile Insights at analytics firm SensorTower told TechCrunch. The app had begun to lose its popularity in recent months, though.

“Downloads in May totaled 275,000 — which was down 38% year-over-year from 476,000 in May 2018. It was ranked No. 1,055 by downloads in India’s Google Play store in May — down from 487 a year ago,” said Nelson.

Once the top smartphone vendor in India, Samsung has lost that crown to Xiaomi. The Chinese smartphone maker has held the tentpole position in India for two straight years now, according to research firm IDC.

A Samsung spokesperson in India, reached out by TechCrunch on Monday, has yet to comment on the story.

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Samsung will announce the next Galaxy Note on August 7

It’s official. Samsung just sent out invites for the next Unpacked event. The big show kicks off at 4PM ET August 7, right here in New York. The timing lines up with rumors that have been floating around for few weeks — not to mention last year’s big event.

And in case there was any mystery around what precisely the company is going to unveil, Samsung has happily spoiled the surprise with the inclusion of a prominent S Pen on the invite. The August event will almost certainly see the debut of the Galaxy Note 10.

Samsung Galaxy Note 9 review

The art appears to hint at an updated camera, as well. Based on recent leaks, the invite looks to be a closeup of the nearly all-screen front of the new phablet, with the single hole punch front facing camera up top. 

The new handset is said to include a vertical three array camera with depth sensing and a 5G option. Samsung is also reportedly dropping the headphone jack this time out, after years pointing to it as a standout feature from the rest of the industry.

Last year’s event also saw a number of additional devices, including the (still unreleased) Galaxy Home smart speaker. And very least maybe we’ll finally be getting a date on that product, along with more information about the long delayed Galaxy Fold.

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Samsung CEO calls Galaxy Fold mishap ‘embarrassing’

In a meeting with a group of journalists in South Korea, Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh candidly addressed the company’s latest hardware mishap. “It was embarrassing,” he told reporters, as quoted by The Independent. “I pushed it through before it was ready.”

That last bit no one can debate, really. After years of preamble, Samsung still managed to jump the gun with the Galaxy Fold. The company was eager to be the first major manufacture to market with the category’s most radical redesign in a decade. Ultimately, however, the company ended up pumping the breaks after multiple reviewers reported problems with their units.

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock

Samsung was quick to place the blame at the hands of reviewers, but eventually shifted tacts after realizing that problems were more widespread. More than two months after the handset was initially expected to hit retail, we’re still very much in a holding pattern with Samsung’s first foldable. Though the company has promised a more concrete date for some time.

Samsung has been quick to deny any rumors that the phone has been altogether canceled, and Koh reiterated that the Fold is still being put through its paces. “I do admit I missed something on the foldable phone, but we are in the process of recovery,” the executive told the press. “At the moment, more than 2,000 devices are being tested right now in all aspects. We defined all the issues. Some issues we didn’t even think about, but thanks to our reviewers, mass volume testing is ongoing.”

Koh didn’t offer specifics with regards to a release date, though the company is reportedly gearing up to launch the next version of the Note at an event in August.

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Samsung launched an app store for Bixby

Oh, Bixby. Samsung made big promises and some key acquisitions ahead of its launch. But the company’s smart assistant got off to a rocky start and has had trouble making a name for itself in amongst a sea of competitors ever since. 

Third-party integration has long been one of the categories in which Samsung has promised to truly distinguish Bixby. Back in November, the company announced that it would finally be opening up the assistant to third-party developers with the release of Bixby Developer Studio. Those developers finally began to deliver on the promises of the company’s Viv Labs acquisition.

The launch of Bixby Marketplace is the next step in the process. Now vendors can make their Bixby integrated services (or “capsules”) available to users. The store opens today in the U.S. and Spain, launching with a handful of key apps, including Google Maps, Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR and Yelp.

That’s a good start, but attracting a critical mass of developers is always the hard part of getting these things off the ground. On the upside, Bixby’s already available on a LOT of devices, when you factor in all of Samsung’s flagships from the last few years. And that number is slowly but surely growing as the company integrates it into additional appliances, TVs and the like. Though the company hasn’t done itself any favors with the still MIA Galaxy Home speakers.

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