LG G4 (Verizon Wireless).
The best supply chain software solutions are designed to support “mobility as a work style.” If they’re not, then chances are, they’re quickly losing competitive ground.Leading smartphone brand, Samsung Electronics West Africa (SEWA), is giving buyers of their latest flagships, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge the opportunity to win over 10,000 giveaways and the world’s first-ever SUHD TV, in the Samsung “ Be the first to own the best” promotion in Ghana.
With that in mind, last week’s news that 600 million Samsung Galaxy phones were discovered to have a major security flaw is more than a bit unsettling. These clearly define the top end of the Android phone market these days, and are quite impressive—the best Android phones I’ve ever carried, with great performance and the best screens I’ve seen on a smartphone to date. Results from countless studies have reiterated what we already know: Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are stealing away tons of business from Android.
But let’s ignore all those because some outfits we’ve never heard of before just sent us a press release about a tiny survey that shows the opposite. …suggest that while plenty of Android users are moving over to iOS, there are also a significant number of iPhone users who have been wooed away by Samsung’s latest flagship phone. Customers will be given scratch cards immediately after their purchase, these cards contain gifts ranging from the Samsung SUHD TV to Samsung headphones. Please define “significant” in this context, as your usage must, by the laws governing human language and the logic upon which our reality is based, be hysterical. LG is using quantum dot technology to improve the color gamut, and it seems to have struck the perfect balance between LCD crispness and OLED-style saturation, with excellent blacks. And also last week, although it doesn’t seem to be getting the news coverage it deserves, the federal government discovered that China has likely hacked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), stealing highly sensitive personal information covering more than 4 million former, current and prospective U.S. government workers.
True story. …CompareMyMobile UK and GadgetValuer USA, iPhone users are ditching their older smartphones and switching to the Galaxy S6 at a surprisingly high rate. Having a removable battery lets you carry a spare, but there are now lots of good external chargers if you need them, and in general, I found battery life was sufficient for a full day in almost all situations.
Memory is harder: both units I tested had 32GB of storage, but the pre-installed software on the Sprint models came to 6.75GB, leaving relatively little local storage. (A few years ago, it would have seemed like a lot, but times change.) Still, in the era of cloud storage, the need for expandable storage has decreased and 32GB is probably sufficient for most people. You can also wake the phone by either tapping sharply on the screen twice, or using a “knock code” of patterned taps that you set, another carryover from previous LG devices. In other words, they are not only the result of not having the right technology-based defenses, they are the result of poor internal security policy and/or lack of compliance to the controls that employers have put in place. Instead, I got a plastic back with a subtle diamond pattern, which gives the phone an all-plastic feel without any of the metal or glass touches on the latest Samsung, HTC, Sony, or Apple phones. Kantor Worldpanel—an organization that’s in the market intelligence business instead of the “buying your used phone” business and claims it surveys “millions” of people—says switchers going the other way are what’s driving iOS’s growth.
And worse, the systems that clear the transactions of day-to-day business are fully integrated to corporate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) –the keys to the kingdom. The Macalope’s not saying that there aren’t people switching from the iPhone, but the Galaxy S6’s sales figures are nothing to write home about, unless your mom is some kind of lackluster sales buff. Not to overstate it, but there’s a lot of truth to the idea that networked models of security “are only as strong as the weakest link.” And because big business will continue to outsource and pursue new markets of customers and supply, the scope of the problem is exploding. “Companies in almost every industry are more reliant than ever upon their vendors, and particularly those in their supply chain. The demand for constant online communication creates enormous opportunities for hackers to exploit weak vendor security practices as a point of entry into their ultimate target,” said Steve Bridges, senior vice president at JLT specialty, an insurance broker specializing in cyber insurance. “Both the buyer and the vendor have issues here.
It is a fact of modern tech news that sites like these—sites that you have generally never heard of—frequently publish outlandish, counter-intuitive conclusions involving Apple to get attention. In addition, as was true on the Note, the screen is vibrant with great colors, and I found it generally looked even a bit better—the best screen I’ve seen yet. The buyer now needs to somehow ensure that all of its vendors are secure, as those vendors face liability issues from their customers should a breach be traced to their failure.” And while a cyber-attack aimed at stealing employee or customer data remains the most talked about risk, attacks designed to deny or disrupt service are also gaining in popularity. “These attacks can jeopardize production and delivery schedules and cause delays that can have rippling impacts upon their customers and their customers’ customers,” added Bridges. The primary use of the Edge is to set it up with a feature called “people Edge,” which lets you pick your five most frequent contacts, each indicated by a different color; the Edge then lights up with that color when you get a notification (a text, email, or phone call from one of those contacts). Bringing a system up to speed or replacing something that’s obviously missing is easier than discovering that a supplier who appeared to have its act together, clearly didn’t.
Network security –especially in a supply chain context—is a team effort that not only requires constant vigilance, but a community-oriented, proactive mindset. These days, it seems almost silly to point out that among the first, most basic and effective steps a community of networked companies can enforce is strong system-to-system authentication. “Corporate usernames and passwords are highly coveted by hackers,” said Darren Guccione, CEO and Co-Founder of Keeper Security, Inc, a password management and secure file storage provider. “Once they attain an employee’s password they can infiltrate the entire company’s system and lurk there for days, weeks or even months without being detected.” A network security expert once told me that “the only foolproof and guaranteed solution to not getting hacked is to unplug,” but that isn’t going to happen. When the main screen is off, you can rub your finger against the Edge to quickly see the time, date, and weather and scroll through some basic news headlines.
So the next best alternative is to apply the latest and greatest network security technologies with an understanding that they are a beginning, not an end. The promise that most of these solutions are sold under is that they won’t stop you from being hacked, but at least you’ll know when it’s happening. In fact, there are many industry experts who would argue that on a percentage basis, assuming reasonable technology-based defense solutions are in place, here’s where business gets its biggest bang for the buck. The S6 has a 16-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, each with an f/1.9 aperture lens designed to improve low-light photography. When you turn the screen brightness up to max, a dialog box appears with the warning: “High brightness setting may increase the temperature of your phone.” That’s not good.
With the screen at maximum brightness, the earpiece was an unpleasant 102.5 degrees, with the bottom of the phone coming in at 95 degrees at rest, to 99.5 degrees while running a heavy graphics task. But many of the more unusual modes that Samsung included in previous models—such as “dual camera,” where you could put a picture of yourself from the front-facing camera inside a picture taken from the real camera—have now been removed from the phone itself, though you can still download them if you want them. The default is 1080p recordings at 30 frames per second, although it also offers a 1080p at 60 frames per second, or 2,560 by 1,440 or UHD/4K 3,840 by 2,160 at 30 frames per second.
For a processor, the S6 sports a 1.5 GHz Samsung Exynos 7420 octa-core, making these the first phones I’ve seen that use applications processors manufactured on a 14nm, FinFET process. Benchmarks from my colleague Sascha Segan show very impressive results, much faster than most Android phones on tasks such as scrolling and photo manipulation. It gives plain-English weather-related suggestions (although some of them are a little weird, like “avoid direct contact with the sun”), then pops down into a few too many panels of task assistant ideas.
It sports a slightly larger 1/2.6-inch, 16-megapixel image sensor when compared with the S6’s 1/3-inch sensor, and features a slightly wider f/1.8 aperture lens to the S6’s f/1.9. Eventually, the S6 is supposed to get Samsung Pay, which has a unique feature of being able to work with traditional magnetic card readers, but that’s not out yet, so I wasn’t able to test. Outdoor shots with both the 16MP main camera and the 8MP front camera were beautiful in outdoor lighting, although be aware that the camera mode defaults to 12MP and 6MP. I was able to quickly look at how models of the Gear VR with the S6 stack up vs. the Note 4 version; the higher-resolution screen does make the virtual reality experience notably better.
The S6 also comes with integrated support for “wireless charging,” (which means you place the phone down on a compatible charging station, without having to plug anything into the phone, though the charging station still has to be plugged in) though you’ll have to buy the charging station separately. The G4 tries very hard, pumping up its virtual ISO to heroic levels and using three-axis optical image stabilization to squeeze some images out of very low-light conditions. However, when compared directly against Galaxy S6 photos taken side-by-side, low-light images on the G4 were considerably softer and did not show usable additional details.
The G4’s front-facing camera is a touch brighter than the S6’s in low light, but the G4’s “selfie flash” trick (which lights up the screen to use it as a flash) really made a difference when I turned it on. For instance, the new Calendar app lacks an “agenda” or “schedule” mode that just lists all your events going forward (rather than focusing on a single day, week, or month). I do like Samsung’s SmartSwitch feature, which will move all the information from an old phone to a new one, including photos, music, contacts, phone logs, and texts.