Samsung switches to advertising the iPad, knocking their own displays

July 14, 2014

Say what you want about Apple's ambitious Your Verse campaign for the iPad Air, but one thing you won't see in it is any device from any competitor. Like all of Apple's ads of late, it focuses exclusively on showing us what we can do with the technology in our hands, from the tops of mountains to the bottom of the sea. Samsung, on the other hand... well... where to begin?

I realize rewarding negative attention seeking just reaffirms that kind of marketing model, but I also realize media needs to not just be consumed but digested.

In the first ad, Samsung wants us to believe a baby will stop crying if only it can get a tiny thumbnail of a cartoon, with audio mixed and mashed up against sports commentary, and various widgets and keyboards popping up all over the place, on a Galaxy Tab. (Yes, like an animal.)

There's no way a real dad, in the real world, wouldn't just let his crying baby enjoy his entertainment full screen, full sound on the iPad while he catches up on his sports on the iPhone that's no doubt in his pocket.

Now, I'm not going to argue that multi-windowing isn't convenient in some use cases — Apple's rumored to be working on it for a future version of iOS — but torturing a baby certainly isn't one of them. (Also, according to the fine print, Samsung is only providing multi-windowing on "select apps", not system wide — the price of not controlling their own software stack.)

The second ad, the one on AMOLED vs. LCD/LED, is even more interesting. Time was AMOLED had tons of compromises, including goofy pentile subpixels on large displays, overblown saturation, and decreased lifespan of blue elements. The technology has come a long way since then. However, Apple obviously doesn't think it's come far enough to be deployed at iPad scale yet. Instead, they're sticking with in-plane switching LCD with LED backlight, a whopping 62% of which were reportedly manufactured by... wait for it...

Samsung.

Yeah. Awkward. But that pretty much sums up several of Samsung's recent anti-Apple ads. Instead of spending half of these commercials showing me an iPad, spend all of them showing me what a Galaxy Tab can do. Just please, pretty please, hire Pacific Helm or the Iconfactory to fix the interface first. Oh, and on getting better voice actors.

Then everyone will benefit.