Marco.org

Apple should be scared of the upcoming competition:

Samsung presented some of the first significant competition to the iPod touch…

I’d call it “potential competition” — it’s not competition if it doesn’t exist yet. And when it does, it’s not really a competitor if it doesn’t sell very well. It’d be difficult to say, for instance, that the Zune was ever really providing “significant competition” to the iPod.

in years…

…ever.

Both run Android 2.2 and will be upgradable to 2.3 in the future.

2.3 has been out for a few months already, and we know how good the Android device manufacturers are at getting updates issued after a device’s sale.

The two ship with 8GB of storage built-in and have microSDHC slots to take up to 32GB more.

They need to cut a lot of costs to get anywhere near Apple’s pricing for the iPod touch, so they’re making users expand the storage later at their own expense. (Anyone think it’ll compete with the 8 GB iPod touch’s $229 price?)

Samsung is keen to tout that, as Android devices, they don’t need a sync app to load content…

…because a good one doesn’t exist…

…and will work with drag-and-drop…

…users will need to “sync” everything manually because Samsung hasn’t written decent sync software…

…for those comfortable with manually loading their media.

…for geeks.

Samsung unusually didn’t give a ship date or a price for either Galaxy Player beyond a spring release,…

…what a surprise…

though they’re expected to cost much less than a Galaxy S-based phone would off-contract.

…we assume (and hope) that an iPod touch competitor would be priced significantly below $700, although how far below that (and how close to the iPod touch’s $229 entry point) isn’t something Samsung is ready to announce yet.