Due to sluggish chip and energy sectors amid a global economic slowdown, South Korea’s major companies performed far worse than their US counterparts in the first half of 2023.

According to FKI report, South Korea’s top 100 nonfinancial firms listed on the main local bourse saw their combined sales edge up 0.3 percent on-year to $746.3 billion in the January-June period.

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Samsung saw its sales, operating profit, and net profit dip 21.5%, 95.4% and 86.9% on-year, respectively. Comparable figures of its US counterpart, Apple, dropped 4.2%, 10% and 9.2%.

The FKI stressed the need for South Korean big businesses to establish stable profit sources as they remain more vulnerable to external shocks than big U.S. companies.

The combined operating profit of the Korean companies tumbled 63.4 percent on-year to $24.8 billion won in the six-month period, while that of the U.S. corporations shrank 3.9 percent to $638.5 billion.

Via

Camera evaluation firm DXOMARK has recently published its Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max review. In the global ranking, Apple’s hottest (LOL!) iPhone is listed second, after Huawei’s P60 Pro, while the real winner – Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is 15th.

The new iPhone 15 Pro Max comes with a 40-megapixel primary, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 12-megapixel telephoto camera. Besides, the A17 Pro chipset gives a further boost to the device, enhancing the camera capabilities and photography skills.

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DXOMARK blessed the iPhone 15 Pro Max with 154 points and praised vivid brightness and contrast, accurate exposure, pleasant and natural color rendering, and skin tones, excellent detail in bright light, fast and accurate autofocus, and effective video stabilization.

iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Specs

Primary

• 48MP sensor, 2.44µm quad pixels, 24mm equivalent f/1.78-aperture lens, Dual Pixel AF, OIS

Ultra-wide

• 12MP sensor, 13mm equivalent f/2.2-aperture lens, Dual Pixel AF

Telephoto

• 12MP sensor, 1.12µm pixels, 120 mm equivalent f/2.8-aperture lens, Dual Pixel AF

At the same time, reviewers listed some cons of the latest Apple phone such as noise in low-light photos, unwanted artifacts, including flare, ghosting, and aliasing, slightly limited dynamic range in photos, and inconsistent detail across all zoom ranges.

Galaxy S23 Ultra secured 140 points, and no one cared about DXOMARK numbers. The device is equipped with 200-megapixel primary, 12-megapixel ultrawide and a dual 10-megapixel telephoto sensor setup. In practical, S23 Ultra is miles ahead of the iPhone in overall capabilities and use of technologies.

Galaxy S23 Ultra Camera Specs

Primary

• 200MP 1/1.3″ sensor, 0.6 μm pixels, f/1.7-aperture lens, PDAF, AF, OIS

Ultra-wide

• 12MP 1/2.55″ sensor, 1.4 μm pixels, f/2.2-aperture lens, PDAF, AF, OIS

Telephoto 1

• 10MP 1/3.52″ sensor, 1.12 μm pixels, f/2.4-aperture lens, PDAF, OIS, 3x optical zoom

Telephoto 2

• 10MP 1/3.52″ sensor, 1.12 μm pixels, f/4.9-aperture lens, PDAF, OIS, 10x optical zoom

Source

Samsung has reportedly tried to make changes in the Galaxy smartphones’ internet browsers design, as part of making it easier to pick the preferred Seach Engine (browser) as default. The company ultimately backed down as Google reminded it about the breach of the agreement.

According to WallStreetJournal, Samsung had attempted to tweak the way of altering the default Galaxy Browser (search engine) for consumer convenience. Meanwhile, Google had opposed the move and emphasized to Samsung that such a move would be a breach of the agreement.

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In the past, it was rumored that the South Korean tech giant was considering Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing as the default search engine on Galaxy devices. However, Google assured it to enhance the search engine as well as bring AI capabilities for competition.

Samsung x Microsoft

ChatGPT to power Samsung AI Chatbot: Samsung’s Strategic Leap into AI Development with Microsoft

According to a recent report from Korean media outlet, Samsung is developing a “Samsung AI Chatbot” that will assist with tasks such as translation and document summarization using the Large Language Model (LLM) developed by OpenAI.

Edaily disclosed that the company is using Microsoft’s “Azure OpenAI Service” to create an AI chatbot for work assistance to be used within the company. If Samsung tries to develop its own generative AI using OpenAI’s LLM, it must use MS Azure Cloud.

• Samsung Electronics is known to have linked OpenAI’s LLM to this service and is undergoing a technology verification (PoC) process.

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