Samsung Android
Samsung has been using the Android operating system since June 2009. The first device Samsung released with Android was the famous Samsung Galaxy mobile phone – which went on to spawn a whole series of Samsung Galaxy devices.
And Samsung have done pretty well out of it. Today, several of the most popular Android mobile phones come from Samsung. The Galaxy S3s sales have been the only manufacturer’s to come even close to the iPhone 5’s.
Samsung Android – Samsung sued by Apple
In the middle of 2011, Apple started a series of lawsuits for Samsung in the UK, US and other territories, for patent violations. Apple claimed that Samsung Android copied ideas and designs from iOS, Apple’s on device Operating System.
Apple won in the US, one of Samsung’s biggest markets. To Samsung, the cost was $1bn – and, strategically, questions over whether Samsung and Android would be synonymous again.
Samsung Android – Touchwiz
One of the alleged patent violations was the similar packaging and application icons by the TouchWiz User Interface. TouchWiz is the overlay user interface Samsung use on top of Android on their mobile phones.
TouchWiz was designed to be an improvement on the original Android UI. TouchWiz originally focused on providing selected apps which Samsung felt were missing from the Android Operating System. Touchwiz offered Samsung the opportunity to bundle a value add with the phone and differentiate their product from other Android manufacturers like HTC.
TouchWiz has been customized by Samsung with unique icon designs and added application features. TouchWiz has ‘Smart Dialing’, the default Android UI doesn’t. In TouchWiz you can change the volume and brightness by sliding left or right on the pulled-down notification bar. The core Android OS doesn’t allow you to do that.
The Samsung Android Interface
The latest version of TouchWiz is called the Nature UX . It was first introduced on the Samsung Galaxy S3 and all Samsung Android mobile phones released since also come with the Nature UX TouchWiz. TouchWiz Nature UX version is ‘inspired by nature’ and comes with new features such as numerous lock screen customizations, totally different visual alterations, added widgets and more. They’re all small user experience enhancements and today, the Android core OS does such a good job, you have to question the value Samsung is adding with TouchWiz.
Samsung Android – Current Range
Samsung Android mobile phones that have the latest version of TouchWiz are all available in the Whatphone Top 7 – see below.