South Korea

Samsung’s Galaxy S III will feature a home button under the display.

South Korea newspaper Korean Digital Daily (translated) added to the rumor machine today with sources that claim the upcoming smartphone will sport Samsung’s accustomed home button, despite much speculation claiming otherwise.

The Galaxy S III will even boast a five-column icon layout showcased in the Samsung Galaxy Note. This would help the device standout from other Android handsets, and the iPhone, which has maintained a four-column icon layout since its initial 2007 launch.

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Google just rolled out updates to a few of its Android apps, the biggest of which brings a ton of new features to “Gmail for Android” 3.2 (Honeycomb) users. Previously, only Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich users had access to features like swiping between conversations, custom notifications for labels, and the ability to sync messages for the last 30 days. All of those features and the rest of the Ice Cream Sandwich Gmail experience are now being implemented for Honeycomb users. The updated app is available on Google Play now, and a full list of the features is below:

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The rumor mill is grinding away after a Samsung representative announced the Galaxy S III is now in the testing phase, while other reports indicate the device will sport a Galaxy Nexus-like screen without employing PenTile pixel layout.

AsiaE reported the device is undergoing tests in South Korea. The phase typically lasts two months, but the article suggested Samsung wants testing done sooner. Meanwhile, Korean website DDaily said the smartphone’s 4.65-inch 720p Super AMOLED screen will not employ the PenTile pixel layout.

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One in 10 South Koreans now own a Galaxy S II smartphone made by Samsung as the company announced that sales of the handset in the 48 million-people country surpassed 5 million units, or more than 10 percent of the country’s population. It took Samsung nine months to hit the milestone since the phone’s release at the end of April 2011.

Strong domestic sales helped Samsung achieve a 53 percent market share for smartphones in South Korean throughout 2011. Japanese business daily The Nikkei said the Galaxy S II is the first handset to sell that many units in the country. In September of last year, Samsung sold 3.5 million Galaxy S II smartphones in South Korea. The 1.2GHz dual-core device comes with a 4.27-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 1GB RAM, Android 2.3 and is upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Hop on board an American Airlines flight this holiday season and your pilot will be wielding an iPad as a flight bag replacement but you – a first-class passenger –  will be treated with a Galaxy Tab 10.1 to keep you entertained. Keen on bringing balance back to the force, the airliner teamed up with South Korea-based Samsung to offer the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on their premium cabins onboard certain transcontinental flights. Here’s the sales line:

Sit back, relax, and let the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 take you to the movies or catch up on your favorite shows. The new device enables a unique viewing experience, featuring a bold and vibrant LCD, with brilliant colors and crisp definition.

Go past the fold for a list of flights serving some Galaxy Tab in-flight entertainment.

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After their $12 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility this summer, many critics began to think Google would favor Motorola over other Android vendors. Google has already assured us that they won’t, but today at a meeting with reporters in South Korea, Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt said that Motorola Mobility will run separately from the rest of the company. Schmidt said:

“In general, with all of our partners, we told them that the Motorola deal will close and we will run it sufficiently and independently, that it will not violate the openness of Android…we’re not going to change in any material way the way we operate.”

The comments of course are to assure other OEMs, like HTC and Samsung, that they won’t be left in the dark after the recent acquisition. Google so far seems to be holding up to their promise, seeing as the Galaxy Nexus is a Samsung device, but time will only tell. (via Reuters)

Eric Schmidt also made comment today that, “Android efforts started before the iPhone efforts.”

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Bloomberg reports that Samsung is expecting to sell 5 times as many tablets as it did in 2010.

The company is on track to raise sales of tablet computers by more than five times this year from 2010 as it planned, J.K. Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile-phone division, said at a media briefing in Seoul today.

Samsung said it had sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs (plus a marginal number of Windows 7 Tablets?) as of January 2011.  It had given estimates as low as 1.5 million for the 4th quarter of 2010, the only quarter it sold tablets last year.

That means Samsung believes it can sell 7.5 million – 10 million tablets this year.  Is that good news?
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You know that scene in GoodFellas where the FBI comes to search the house for the 15th time in as many weeks and Karen Hill explains how they are on a first name basis and she’s cordial and serves them coffee while they turn over her house?  That’s how Google’s South Korean office must feel.

Google’s Seoul office has been searched by the police at least twice since August last year amid investigations into whether the company illegally collected wireless Internet data and location information from Android smartphone users.

They got raided yet again by the South Korean government this week over whether the search giant was making it too difficult for local competitors NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Corp., who together control 90% of the Korean Search market, to get their search onto Android handsets.

The charge is that Google delays certification to handset makers who include other companies’ search products, Seongnam-based NHN said in April.  Google will probably say that it takes longer to certify third party software.

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Yonhap News is reporting that 10 million units of Android smartphones have been sold in South Korea. South Korea’s biggest carrier, SK Telecom Co, has a whopping 6.18 million Android subscribers under its belt. KT Corp. is following second with 2.06 million, and LG Uplus Corp hosts 1.86 million and is following with the third spot. The 10 million Android smartphones makes up for 70% of South Korea’s phone market according to the report. Apple’s iPhone, by comparison, has 2.5 million iPhones in the South Korea market on its dominant carrier.  Figures weren’t yet available for SK Telecom.

South Korea is of course the home turf of big Android makers Samsung Electronics Co., LG Electronics Inc. and Pantech Co.

And you thought the US was high with 50%?

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It didn’t take long for the iPhone location tracking issue to escalate and get blown out of proportion. The story spread like a wildfire as we learned that both Google and Apple were summoned for the May 10 Congressional hearing. That was just a warm up, though. Reuters reports that South Korea police is after the search giant, having raided their Seoul office on Tuesday.

The reason? AdMob, Google’s mobile advertising arm, was illegally collecting location data from Android users without their consent. That’s the official line the country’s authorities provided to Reuters.

The probe into suspected collection of data on where a user is located without consent highlights growing concerns about possible misuse of private information as the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases.

We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the raid and said the company was co-operating with investigators. This latest development follows-up on the news that the governments of South Korea, France, Germany and Italy are considering probing Apple over the location data gathering fiasco.