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Samsung trolls iPhone-toting ‘wall huggers’ at power outlets in major airports

Screen Shot 2014-08-13 at 8.09.07 PM

Image via Cnet

Last month Samsung ramped up the anti-Apple rhetoric with a new ad campaign that depicted iPhone users as “wall huggers,” constantly tethered to a power outlet due to the inferior battery in their non-Samsung smartphones. Today Cnet reports that the company has taken its campaign one step further by trolling real-life iPhone users at power outlets throughout major airports.

The new ads take the form of posters near power outlets that read, “Samsung Galaxy S5 with Ultra Power Saver Mode,” followed by a tagline that appears to poke at Apple’s own recent ad campaign: “So you have the power to be anywhere but here.” If you’d like to take a gander at the latest salvo in the ever-escalating flame war between Apple and Samsung, you’ll be able to do just that very soon at JFK, O’Hare, and Midway airports. Samsung says even more airports could be getting the ads if they’re successful in the first three.

Apple is currently planning to announce the iPhone 6 on September 9th, though rumors say it doesn’t look like the new model will provide much hope for the “wall huggers.”

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Comments

  1. lee scott (@theleescott) - 10 years ago

    i can’t imagine for the life of me why i would ever want to go into a power saving mode, where most of the features on my phone don’t work…i would much much rather plug in for 20 minutes and get 35 percent of my batter back than sit with a dark phone where only text and phone works? you nailed it sammy, great job on the add campaign…”Buy a samsung and turn it 90 percent off” you’ll definitely have a better experience!

  2. Lee (@leemahi) - 10 years ago

    I bet Apple is going to say, “Now even with the quad core display, with over 50 million pixels projecting into your retina, we still managed to get that same 7 hour battery life that you’ve come to expect from your iPhone.”

    • whatyoutalkingboutwillis - 10 years ago

      Wowwee, quad core displays! I’ve never even seen a single core displays, but Apple surpassed my understanding of how displays work and placed + 4 times as many cores as all other displays have.

    • Cory Ducey (@duceyco) - 9 years ago

      What’s a quad core display?

  3. lkernan - 10 years ago

    Because the Samsung wonderphone never needs to be plugged in to a socket.
    It’s only a matter of time before a Galaxy is photographed plugged into these sockets.

    • herb02135go - 10 years ago

      Actually, I charge my S5 about half as much as I did my iphone while using it much more.

      The power saver mode, which I needed to use yesterday, indicated two DAYS of power while allowing use of about 10 key apps.

      So, yes, Samsung is very accurate with its claims of improve battery life.

      Not sure why this website has to resort to Samsung bashing for content. I guess it’s fear.

      • How is this article “bashing” Samsung?

      • WaveMedia (@WaveMedia) - 10 years ago

        It does help that the S5 is 1091203 times larger than the iPhone, battery included.

      • Mike Knopp (@mknopp) - 10 years ago

        The last statement is also true of Samsung.

        Not sure why Samsung has to resort to Apple bashing for marketing. I guess it’s fear.

        Although, I am confused as to what you found in the article that was bashing Samsung. Other than a question of why Samsung feels the need to bash Apple.

        It is really sad when the best Samsung commercial that I have ever heard was made by AT&T. No mention of Apple at all. No bashing on anyone. Just a nice, memorable, and funny commercial touting Samsung’s Active phones.

      • jrox16 - 10 years ago

        Isn’t it Samsung bashing Apple here? Why does every Samsung commercial constantly bash Apple and Apple users? I’d say Samsung is the one with the fear given their sales have taken a dramatic downturn this year.

      • flaviosuave - 10 years ago

        “Not sure why this website has to resort to Samsung bashing for content.”

        Probably for the same reason you consistently troll an Apple site despite apparently hating and never using their products – residual emotional issues from the fact your mother never loved you and you don’t have any friends.

      • thejuanald - 10 years ago

        @wavemedia, to be fair, the Galaxy S5 has a much larger screen than the iPhone, so that would drain a lot of battery power. That said, my Note 3 goes through the battery pretty quickly with heavy use.

  4. akismet-006da6d3253de80bf7351e94a6fc7a8f - 10 years ago

    Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  5. Samsung could power their phones with a miniaturized fusion reactor that lasts for centuries and I still wouldn’t want to buy one.

  6. boarddworld - 10 years ago

    I hate Samsung to the core, but I love this advertising. Not because it’s going to do Samsung much good in sales, but because Tim Cook and the team are getting a really nice shove towards improving the battery. The iPhone 4S, what a wonderful phone, but “completely” handicapped by the battery. This has been needed since the iPhone 3G…

    It blows me away that they invested 500,000,000 and counting on Sapphire production when they could have put that into nano tech batteries which provide either 10x the output or a 10x reduction in size compared to Li-ion.

    Could you imagine your iPhone lasting 8 days with heavy use! Thinking about it Apples usage stats would sky-rocket from all those that don’t like hugging walls being able to use their iPhones.

    • aeronperyton - 10 years ago

      “Because I saw Apple do A, I don’t see how they can also do B.”

      Remember, Apple signed a deal with Tesla involving their new gigafactory that makes batteries and is developing new battery tech. One can only imagine where that will lead.

      • boarddworld - 10 years ago

        Yes, but in a timely manor… It’s still the key feature I look out for every year. It sincerely wouldn’t surprise me if I’m let down again this year; Samsung’s wall huggers campaign should have come earlier.

  7. Vaibhav Singh (@vs511) - 10 years ago

    I personally think this is great. Apple really needs to step up their game in terms of battery life.

  8. Alfons Berger - 10 years ago

    Well done Samsung! Not that I use an Android phone, but Apple needs to step up and finally improve battery life. I really like my Mac, but as for a phone, I’m more than happy with a Lumia 1320 which btw lasts easy three days without a single charge and syncs with everything I need from my Mac.

  9. dksmidtx - 10 years ago

    Truth hurts. Since when is it trolling to point out the truth? I’ve been an iPhone loyalist since standing in line in June 2007 to pick up the very first – and it has ALWAYS had sub-par battery performance. If it takes a billion, they need to either expend the funds to make a true all day battery iPhone (better still 2-3 DAYS), or give up trying to make it as thin as a piece of paper and pack that sucker full of battery!

  10. nik (@n13) - 10 years ago

    This is good advertising, period.

    The need to plug an iPhone in the wall almost constantly is a joke in terms of usability. I am guessing that the iPhone 6 will make these obsolete. Because with the 6, Apple will finally use Samsung’s own “trick” for improving battery life: A huge screen can fit a huge battery underneath. with 4.7 and 5.5″, I believe the wall hugging and / or extra-battery-pack carrying will come to an end.

    • Mike Knopp (@mknopp) - 10 years ago

      Sorry, but I have to disagree. Increasing the surface area doesn’t gain you much when you decrease the thickness.

      I think that the iPhone 6 is going to be their slap in the face that people are sick of the relentless push to ultrathin at the expense of all else.

  11. aeronperyton - 10 years ago

    Seeing everyone in an airport charging an iPhone doesn’t tell me that they are the only phones that need recharging, it tells me that a lot more people use iPhones.

    Strip away all the toothy grins of market-speak and you realize that Samsung phones still need to be plugged in everyday just like every other smartphone on the planet. And when you put those phones in the hands of business people who are rushing everywhere and forgetting to plug their phone in at night, those same people are going to hug the wall no matter which phone they use. And you’re always going to see more iPhones because there are more iPhones in-use.

    Go ahead Samsung, continue to pump money into attack ads. Just like Microsoft, that’s what you represent as a company now.

    • Shon - 10 years ago

      Agreed. That’s why I think this is a marketing fail.

      Que all of the pics of Samesung phones being charged in front of these ads. That slap you hear, isn’t Apple’s face. It’s Samesung’s embarrassed one, as this comes back to haunt them.

      Imagine all of the poor Samesung users that NEED/WANT to charge, but don’t want to be embarrassed doing so in one of these stations.

      It’s a sad society, where negative, angry advertising gets so much attention. I’m proud of Apple for their “high road” mentality within their advertising. Even when they went after MS back in the 90s, it was still very cute, and tongue-in-cheek.

  12. KW Phua - 10 years ago

    The brightness of S5 only 60% of 5S. That allow S5 to stay 2 hrs longer or 20%. Just need to set 5S to same brightness as S5, you can achieve more then 20% longer B Life.

  13. Randy March - 10 years ago

    I LOL’d at “Ultra Power Saver Mode”. Hey, Samsung, guess what? iOS has this power mode enabled all the time whenever the device is offline (battery)! Since 1.0. Without feature loss. (Recent OS X releases too.)

    Every good iOS developer knows the amount of technologies built in iOS and actually uses them (Facebook, I’m looking at you).

    iOS prohibits apps from using significant CPU, memory, and power and uses throttles.

    Apps can delay significant operations (downloads, uploads, or caching, for example) up to a day (or so; I’m not sure here). The system automatically executes them when it deems them efficient (AC online, good Wi-Fi connection, …).

    The system wakes up apps in the background to make them cache information (“background app refresh”). It uses a statistical engine to determine when this is most appropriate.

    The CPU goes to stand-by as much as possible. For that, the system attempts to delay timers (with the app’s permission) for several seconds to minimise spin-down/spin-up costs. Basically, the CPU uses nearly zero power for seconds at a time; on the long run, this is a very significant saving. The same goes for the radios; the system attempts bursting (pushing as much as possible data in a short time).

    There’s no garbage collection. On memory-constrained devices, GC is quite inefficient. (You need about 75% free memory to approach near-manual memory management performance. Try that with 1 GB of available memory for your game or even photo-management app. OH MY GOD THOSE (uncompressed) BITMAP BUFFERS CAN BECOME HUUUUUGE)

    All code is native. There’s no Java compiler that needs to be run on the device. Swift further improves that with extra optimisations (less atomic retains/releases, smarter value copies, cross-method analysis …) and less method dispatch; in the future, it’ll get only more efficient. (Google seems to finally start to realise this point with Android L.)

    There are many others, but I think you get the idea.

    The only reason some devices have longer battery life is that have a significantly larger battery. They focus on maximising available power instead of conserving it. If Apple were to focus on a slightly larger/better battery instead of ever-shrinking devices, they’d be the ultimate battery-life champions.

    P.S.: I’m (incredibly) biased in my life about iOS and OS X, but I did attempt to keep it truthful. If you see something wrong, please correct me.

  14. Chris TheVegan - 10 years ago

    I travel every other week and see people scouring the airport for outlets to charge their iPhones, Androids, Windows phones and Blackberries. This is not an Apple battery issue. But the marketing is very clever! But that is why I carry a Mophie juice pack for my iPhone 5, no waiting for outlets.

  15. rettun1 - 10 years ago

    I saw this yesterday when I was flying at o’hare, but it wasn’t an iPhone user that was plugged into it…. Oh the irony

  16. thinkman12345 - 10 years ago

    From a glance (as most ads are seen), the more prominent “Galaxy S” logo makes this look like it’s disparaging Samdung, not Apple!

  17. oscaralaniz - 10 years ago

    We have a lot of Samsung charging stations in Mexico City’s Airport. I find it ironical that Samsung criticizes so much Apple “wall huggers” but they offer so many charging points.

    It’s like somebody creates a car and claims it only uses 10% of gas compared to other cars but all the gas stations were made by them.

    I don’t get Samsung strategy.

  18. Eli Matar - 10 years ago

    Thats a spot on advertisement. Thats exactly me with my 5S.
    My name is Eli and I am a Wall Hugger.

  19. Does that mean Samsung’s taking all their existing charging stations out of airports?

    https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/img/art/0810/081007_p16_perkonomics12.jpg

  20. Kevin A (@kevinsky) - 10 years ago

    If I’m away from wifi, I have to swap the battery usually by 4pm in my samsung. I know the android army will call it a feature that I CAN swap the battery, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t get to the end of my workday on a single charge on my samsung, unless I turn off so many features that the phone no longer meets my needs. My old iPhone 4s at least usually made it till almost bedtime.