At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, Samsung's Dr Injong Rhee appears to take a bit of a snipe at Apple, saying that "On a samsung device, you see a lot of partner products. We dont force our users to use Samsung products and services. If our in-house service is not good enough, we'll look for the best of the breed." Rhee warned that it's easy for handset manufacturers to fall into the trap of the Larkin Effect, and just as Samsung uses partner chipsets, it also doesn't believe in the handcuff approach when it comes to products and services. He cited Samsung's Dropbox partnership as a key example: "We launched a Dropbox service on our galaxy S3. It's the best of the breed in the cloud storage service. We can actually developed cloud service solutions in Samsung, but we know we have to use Dropbox because the customer wants it. We've not just launched a preload; we're doing an integration of Dropbox with our systems applications like camera and gallery, to provide a better user experience, and combining our differentiation in terms of hanrdware support." Not unexpectedly, Lars Fjeldsoe-Lielsen, Head of Mobile Business Development for Dropbox, agreed with the notion of partnering saying that the state of the digital ecosystem right now is that all the rules are changing. - Independent Services Replacing Carrier Services: "Carriers have been making their own services - lets do cloud services, instant messaging, music, social networking. Each has been taken up by…
