As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Samsung has challenged Apple’s smartphone dominance with yesterday’s introduction of the third-generation Galaxy S smartphone at the Unpacked event in London.
Featuring an incremental bump up in specs and a host of software enhancements, you’d assume Samsung’s marketing folks would proudly show off the device in official advertising.
Not so fast. A side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S III commercials indicates Sammy’s got a whole lot of learning to do: their 60-second advert features the flagship handset three times less frequently than Apple’s commercial…
As we reported yesterday (for the sake of discussion), the new Galaxy takes aim at the iPhone.
Disregarding for a minute the growing similarities between Apple’s shiny adverts and Samsung’s over the top commercials, the new Galaxy gets little love as their 60-second ad features the actual product for ten seconds only.
For comparison, Apple’s commercial proudly features the iPhone 4S for 27 seconds, nearly three times more often.
And Apple’s is a 30-second ad, half the Samsung ad’s running time.
[tube]FDzCrBeNEg8[/tube]
As for the new Galaxy, reviewers seem to like it, with some opining it’ll give the iPhone a good run for its money – at least until Apple releases its sixth next-generation iPhone later this year.
Taking a page from Apple’s book, the South Korean conglomerate gave the handset an incremental hardware refresh augmented with a slew of software-based enhancements.
On the hardware front, the Galaxy S III features a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor, a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display sporting a 1280-by-720 pixel resolution, an eight-megapixel back camera and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera.
Software features are far more interesting.
For example, the phone tracks your eyes to figure out when you want to use it and sports a pop-up player of sorts, allowing you to watch a movie while multitasking.
It’s also got a Siri knock-off dubbed S-Voice (what’s with that purple tint, by the way), can recognize faces on the photos you take for automatic social sharing and has an Airplay-like feature that streams content to an HD TV set through the AllShare Cast Dongle, which is akin to the Apple TV set-top box.
At press time, the Galaxy S III television commercial on Samsung Mobile’s YouTube channel was conspicuously set to private.
If you’ve been wondering why all the fuss and can afford to spare an hour and fifteen minutes, the full Unpacked event video is now available online, included right below.
[tube]gAh9frGNulY[/tube]
Yes, Samsung’s ad is attempting to evoke emotions.
But in my personal opinion, the company should consider hiring another advertising agency, because the advert ignores the basic rule – that folks like to see a product being advertised.
In related news, Flipboard for Android just debuted on the Galaxy S III.
Something tells me Phil Schiller won’t like this.
Kudos to Cult of Mac‘s John Brownlee for bringing Guida iPhone‘s original discovery to attention.
Looks like Samsung’s advertising department could make use of Apple’s marketing handbook to learn a thing or two about product promotion, no?