Walyou

Samsung Tab S’ Black Level and Thickness Are a Tough Match for iPad Air

Posted: 20 Jul 2014 09:49 AM PDT

Apple’s iPad Air will finally have to step down from its ivory tower, as there’s a new tablet in town that’s claiming the best tablet in the world title.

The only things that the iPad Air ruled upon were the design, the thickness and the display, thanks to the Retina technology. Other than that, the processing power of Apple’s tablet wasn’t exactly otherworldly. Luckily for Android fans, Samsung decided to launch Tab S, a tablet that won’t be that easy to beat. It features an amazing display with never-seen-before-in-a-tablet levels of black, it’s incredibly slim, and it has a sleek design that will make a lot of heads turn.

I mentioned that the levels of black are unmatched in tablets because the technology was actually ported by Samsung from its smartphones. More precisely, the Tab S comes with a Super AMOLED display that renders black beautifully. This makes text extraordinarily crisp, and colors so bright that put Skittles to shame. Because of the crisp text, books and magazines are easier to read on Tab S that pretty much on any other tablet. The 2560×1600(WQXGA)resolution also helps a lot in that respect.

At 6.6 mm in thickness, Tab S is thinner than the iPad Air by 0.9 mm. That should give Apple a purpose in life, as until now this company was only after people’s money, their strongest argument being the design.

Samsung made it quite clear that the Tab S wasn’t built for Candy Crush Saga. Don’t get me wrong, that game (and many others) will run flawlessly on this Android tablet, but it would be a pity to waste all that power and incredible design on such activities. If it wasn’t obvious already, the Tab S was built for office work, it’s design and specs making it a productivity beast.

Of course, there already are a lot of Apple fanboys that claim that the Tab S won’t ever be able to match the iPad Air, despite all the clear differences. They argue that Apple controls both the hardware and the software of its products, while Samsung can only take care of the hardware, while the OS remains in Google’s care. Of course, they also point out that Android is inferior to iOS, but I always fail to see why.

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Facebook’s Buy Button Means to Shorten the Way between Liking and Owning

Posted: 19 Jul 2014 01:47 PM PDT

The social network thought of a way that helps its users make purchases without leaving the site. The Buy button isn’t much of a surprising move, as many users anticipated it.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it will start testing the Buy button both on desktop and mobile platforms. The businesses that are collaborating with the social network on this project either place the Buy button in Facebook ads or in page posts. Regardless of the chosen method of delivery, the purported goal is quite clear: the social network intends to help its users save time (but not necessarily money), while making sure that they’re not leaving its website. The real goal might be completely different, as this is yet another proof that Facebook turned greedy.

Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, pointed out that “This represents a tremendous opportunity for savvy small businesses to generate sales in real time. This is an opportunity for innovation. This could be so incredibly successful if businesses think about it as a new opportunity.”

Yet another thing that’s not surprising, besides Facebook implementing the Buy button, is the reaction people had when hearing the news. On CNN, Will Fuller commented: “Koooool! I’ll never use it. #guaranteed.” There were others saying that they will never use this feature, and that this thing is something that helps Facebook’s shareholders, and not its users.

One of the main rules of marketing is that a company cannot exist without customers, and seeing people’s attitude towards this social network, I’d say that Facebook’s days are numbered. First, it was teenagers that deleted their accounts, but now grown-ups are starting to have the same reaction. One of the reasons is advertising fatigue, as this company doesn’t know what to do to make news feeds (and important content, in general) as narrow as possible, while making ads wider.

The Buy button’s downsides don’t stop here. Most companies encourage people to visit their websites so that more products (either complementary or unrelated), while the use of the Buy button implies the purchase of a single product. There are plenty of skeptics out there, as far as this new feature is concerned, so it will be interesting to see if it really has a future.

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