I imagine the last year or so at Samsung must have been pretty liberating for the South Korean company’s in-house designers. With Apple breathing down Sammy’s neck, threatening all sorts of legal action over some design infringement “misunderstandings”, it must have ushered in a renaissance of sorts. What would happen if Samsung was not beholden to the whims of Apple’s design cues, slavishly forced to transcribe every iOS device nuance into PowerPoint comparisons in an attempt to mimic Cupertino’s latest and greatest? What if the creative elements within the company were allowed to tempt their muses and explore their inspiration?
sadtrombone.aif – Courtesy of Android Police
Exactly what you’d expect Samsung would deliver once kicked off Apple’s design tit. Behold the Galaxy Note 10.1. The Verge, which I hear receives at least one death threat when they rate an Android tablet below a 7 out of 10, gave the Note a 5.4, noting the cheap build quality that has become the new Samsung trademark and the (still) laggy performance despite its 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor and 2GB of RAM. Just 4 more cores, guys, and we swear it’s going to perform. The photo above was courtesy of an even more savage thrashing of the Note by the Android Police, and it just may be the funniest thing you read today. I don’t want to ruin too much, but I will share my favorite line:
Asus, Apple, and Motorola are building tablets out of aluminum, and Samsung is doing… this. This is the build quality I would expect in a $100 Chinese-knockoff “Android Tablet” from the bottom shelf of a Kmart, not a $500 tablet from the world’s largest Android OEM. Samsung should be ashamed.
The reviewer then goes on to rip Samsung’s TouchWiz UI sodomizing of stock Android Jelly Bean…err Ice Cream Sandwich, the screen, the pen – just about every feature of the device. All this coming from a site that embraces Android.
The reviewers of the Note are so unimpressed with the device (and let’s face it, “unimpressed” is the Gaussian blur applied to an Android device that sucks balls; no big site reviewer is going to slam an Android device “off the curve” as Gruber would say, lest they attract the ire of the commentariat neckbeard posse), one wonders if Samsung didn’t intentionally release it as a way of crying foul about having to design around Apple’s patents. “We wanted to build something that would surprise and delight, but Apple’s rounded rectangle patents wouldn’t let us! See how you’re hurting the market, imperialist American juries?”
Nah. I’m going with the whole “they suck at design” theory.
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