Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Samsung says it’s nano-like S3 Slim is the size of a “standard business card holder”, at only 0.4-inches thick (10.16mm) and weighing only 1.8 ounces (51 grams), while coming endowed with a 1.8-inch screen, a touch smaller than the Sansa Fuze’s 1.9-inch screen and the iPod nano’s 2-inch screen.
As is usual with iPod competitors, it offers plenty of additional features. You can play MP3 and WMA audio files, listen to and record FM radio, view your JPEG photos, play MP4 videos, read text files and play some simple inbuilt games.
Interestingly there is no voice recorder, something that mp3 makers normally throw in as one of the features to ‘beat’ the iPod.
Samsung have made the S3 Slim available in green, red, blue, and the “classic” black and white, with just on 25 hours of audio playback and four hours of video playback – the images are below.
The S3 Slim - Samsung's latest answer to the iPod nano
The familiar storage size options of 4GB and 8GB are present, as is Samsung’s previously mentioned DNSe 2.0 “sound engine” for audio enhacement.
Sadly, Samsung makes no mention of price, but one can only assume that Samsung’s playesr will be price competitive against Apples, Creative’s and everyone else’s offerings.
Apple still holds the ‘ease of use’ crown, so hated by those who want to just manually copy and paste mp3 files to and from their players, a function which is admittedly very handy but useless for those that just want a simple way to manage their music collections without needing to learn Windows Explorer.
Of course Windows Explorer is not difficult, but when you are selling to a mass market, keeping it simple, sweetie, is but one of the ingredients that has made the iPod so successful.
Samsung will no doubt do well against other iPod competitors with their new players, but I still very much doubt if these two new players will have that much of an impact against Apple.
If they do, I’ll happily find the closest (real, crunchy) Apple and eat it, but we’ll just have to wait a few months to see just how successful Samsung truly with be with the S2 and the S3.
In the meatime, my iPods do it for me, and while I do like Samsung’s designs, they’re not enough to tempt me. Do they tempt you?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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