Steve Jobs' Perfectionism Lives On As Apple's Competitive Advantage Against Samsung

I distinctly remember Steve Jobs stating on a conference call that Apple cannot ship trash.  Throughout his life Jobs remained true to this principle.

In recent times, Tim Cook has hewed to the Jobs principle of not shipping trash, too.  Most notably, Cook has resisted making larger screens and a shift to OLED technology for displays because he has felt that they are not ready for prime time.  You may agree or disagree with Cook, but you have to give him credit for keeping quality above shipping products with trade-offs.

In contrast Samsung has never had any qualms about shipping features that were not fully ready.  Samsung’s new flagship phone Galaxy S4 is no exception.  It contains a number of seemingly half-baked, poorly thought out gimmicks.

Galaxy S4 has a feature called smart pause.  This feature will automatically pause a video when the user looks away from the screen.  This is accomplished by the front camera detecting eye movements.  I was multitasking and decided to see the quality of video on the phone.  The phone paused the video after about two seconds.  Obviously Samsung designers just put this half-baked feature without thinking of those who multitask and look away from a video but still want to listen to it.

Another gimmicky feature in Galaxy S4 is smart scroll.  In this feature, the camera detects the tilt of the head to scroll the text when reading a long column.  For me it does not work well.  It scrolled past where I want to be, it does not allow to scroll text back and puts users neck in an uncomfortable position.   Again, I suspect that I am not the only one who in general complains about neck strain because of spending long hours in front of computer screens.  The last thing I want is another device that causes neck strain.

Galaxy S4 also works as a TV remote control.  Apple bulls have long touted that iTV will have an edge because millions of iPhone users will be able to use their phones as remote controls.  The concept is great but it is poorly implemented in S4 and is highly unreliable.

Group play is another feature in S4 that lets speakers of a number of S4 devices be synched to play loud stereo music.  It is a cool feature but again not well implemented.

Apple deserves credit for doing it right and not shipping half-baked gimmicks like Samsung does. Do not get me wrong, without these gimmicky features and user interface, S4 is a great device especially for the power user.  If you are a power user trying to decide if you should buy S4, please see my column from yesterday, Galaxy S4 Is A Great Device, Save The Software And Gimmicks.

Follow me here to know when I write next. I am an engineer and nuclear physicist and edit four investment newsletters at The Arora Report.