Super Bowl: iPhone 5 June release date likely with Galaxy Note potshot

February 6, 2012 by Bill Palmer

by Bill Palmer

The upcoming release date for the iPhone 5 just took on new meaning for Apple after rival Samsung took a bizarre potshot at the company with a Super Bowl ad today for its new Android-based Galaxy Note product. Samsung’s Note is one of the more odd consumer tech products to come to market in some time, as its 5.3 inch screen makes it too big to be a smartphone (although it’s equipped as one) and too small to be a tablet – and the device inexplicably comes with a stylus for screen input. But the specifics of Samsung’s oddball new Android product stood out less today than the fact that the entire ninety second ad was designed as a stab at Apple and its customers. The clip depicted customers standing in front of an Apple Store being lured into trying out the Galaxy Note instead, which suddenly turns them into more interesting and outgoing people. The implication is that Apple customers are boring sheep, and it’s one which likely has Apple ready to shove the iPhone 5 down Samsung’s throat as soon as it can muster up a release date. That means June at the WWDC conference, which marks a return to summer iPhone launch dates…

Apple has already launched a worldwide campaign aimed at getting Samsung’s copycat products like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which is indecipherable from the iPad with the screen turned off) and the Galaxy S2 (a slightly less blatant ripoff of the iPhone 4) removed from the market due to patent violations. The Galaxy Note doesn’t appear to directly rip off any of Apple’s products – maybe someone should give circa 1999 Palm a call – but the implication on the part of Samsung that Apple users are sheep isn’t a new one. Years ago, Samsung launched an “iSheep” campaign aimed at convincing iPod users that they were idiots and should move to a Samsung MP3 player instead. The campaign met with widespread criticism and was quickly shelved. Today’s ad, which simultaneously attempted to promote the already-launched Galaxy Note and to chastise users of Apple products, felt like a shot below the belt (even for two companies trying to destroy each other in the courts) and may motivate Apple, whose late CEO Steve Jobs already considered Android to be a “stolen product” and declared his intent to destroy it, to take more aggressive measures against Samsung. The most aggressive move Apple could make would be to launch the iPhone 5 this summer as opposed to waiting until the fall like it did last year with the iPhone 4S…

The move would allow the iPhone, which began taking significant U.S. marketshare away from Android in 2011 after it finished expanding to multiple carriers (the iPhone gained about twenty percent marketshare in Q4 while Android collectively lost about fourteen percent, according to Nielsen), to move the dial even faster without leaving any time for the iPhone 4S to grow old and sales to fall off. Apple is in a unique position to give the iPhone 5 a release date as early in 2012 as it wants, as it was supposed to have launched last year and is rumored to already be ready to go. In the mean time the iPhone 4S serves as a placeholder, one which is taking marketshare away from Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy phones even as Samsung spends millions of dollars making fun of Apple users during the Super Bowl. Here’s more on the iPhone 5.