Super Bowl ad, product disappoint

Indianapolis was on display last weekend hosting this year's Super Bowl. The game itself was entertaining if you're a football fan. Of course, the non-football fans around the world tuned in for the commercials.

Technology companies have been a staple of Super Bowl advertising for decades now, but not all of the ads are always that inspired. Whether the ad is GoDaddy throwing out the same sexist garbage year over year, or the latest .com company trying to make a big splash, the Super Bowl offers an insane number of eyeballs for an insanely high price.

This year's technology-related ads didn't really catch my attention, other than Samsung's. Samsung ran an ad depicting groups of people as sheep waiting in line for the latest iPhone. The ad doesn't do much to tout why Samsung smartphones are better than Apple. Rather, they focus on insulting the majority of people who use Apple products.

During the proper television broadcast, Samsung did run an advertisement for its new Galaxy Note tablet/phone hybrid (Phonelet?). The Galaxy Note is a 5-inch Android phone that is bigger than most traditional smartphones but not as big as the 7- to 9-inch tablets on the market today.

Samsung's selling point for the Galaxy Note? It has a stylus. Yes, one of those little pens that you used with old PDAs. Samsung touts it as a feature, but I can't imagine why, when the past five years of smartphone and tablet technology have proven that an index finger is the best stylus you can have. And as an added bonus, you likely won't leave your finger stylus behind.

One could argue there are reasons to prefer a stylus to a finger for more precise input, but that isn't something to build an entire device around.

I keep a Griffin stylus in my backpack for those few times I want to draw on my iPad with a bit more precision than my finger allows. My iPad is nearly twice the size of the Galaxy Note, however. I can't imagine ever needing that sort of precision input on my phone.

It's also curious that the newest flagship phone being introduced during an expensive Super Bowl slot isn't even running the latest version of Android. Rather than running 4.0, it's still lagging behind on Android 2.3 with Samsung's custom skinning layer on top of it. Android 4.0 has been out long enough at this point that freshly launched phones should be shipping with it. Not doing so ensures that the device is obsolete before even the first customer touches it.

Samsung is notorious for copying all aspects of Apple's iPhone product line from hardware, software and even its packaging. Both a phone/tablet hybrid and a stylus are definitely not things it copied, and I'm pretty sure the big fruit company in Cupertino is just fine with that for once.
