Tech Brief: Galaxy S7 Looms, Alphabet Schools Apple, Amazon Comes To Life

Jovi Ho

Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week!

An upcoming Samsung VS Apple release battle, Alphabet passing Apple Inc. as the most valuable company on Earth, and an age-old paper book/e-book debate rages on at Amazon. The tech giants’ claws are all out this week in DANamic.ORG’s Tech Brief.

Samsung, Apple Announce New Releases Coming Soon

Unveiling the next in its ~~Guardians of the~~ Galaxy series, Samsung has cryptically announced with a video the arrival of the Galaxy S7 phone. #TheNextGalaxy drops a pretty big hint, no?

To be unveiled on 21st February in Barcelona, the release is meant to shadow the Mobile World Congress, which starts on the 22nd in the same country. Also revealing a new phone at the event is LG, but they’re not the most popular kid right now, are they?

Fast forward three weeks and Apple will be set to announce a 4-inch iPhone and a new iPad Air. Though everything’s still speculative at this point, we do know that something’s coming on 15 March.

Alphabet (Google) Finally Catches Up With Apple

After 7 long years, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) has overtaken Apple as the most valuable company on Earth. The two giants now stand at US$570 billion (GOOG) and US$534.66 billion (APPL) respectively, both punching at least a hundred billion above Microsoft‘s (MSFT) worth of US$432.72 billion. That’s a lot of zeros.

We did the math and Apple’s value can buy you 278,468,750,000 15-inch MacBook Pros in Singapore dollars. Still too big to grasp? That’s more than 51,000 laptops for every person in Singapore. You could literally unbox a brand-new MacBook each day for 141 years.

Amazon, Torchbearer Of The e-Book Revolution, Now Opening Bookstores?

After running traditional brick-and-mortar retailers such as Borders to the ground, is Amazon looking to do a better job than their dated, struggling counterparts? It’s not really gonna happen. Following reports earlier in the week about the online retailer planning to open “300 to 400 PHYSICAL bookstores nationwide”, it turns out they won’t be what we imagined.

As Fast Company reported, don’t expect Amazon to go down the ill-fated traditional path. Instead, Amazon is said to be planning “hybrids that cherry-pick from the physical experiments it’s launched already – part showroom/boutique, part warehouse, part pickup and shipping window, and, yes, part traditional bookstore – all operating as a physical node of an otherwise digital business”.