Oliver Haslam on February 27, 2018, 3:37 am

Samsung Makes Fun Of iPhone X Notch, Insists Galaxy S9 Didn’t Copy Apple’s Animoji

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ are now officially the most current flagship phones around, or at least they will be once they go on sale in a couple of weeks. The current incumbent, the iPhone X, is not going to go away any time soon though, and while Samsung should be focussing on its own accomplishments with the Galaxy S9 lineup, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Justin Denison couldn’t help but take a swipe at Apple during Mobile World Congress 2018, currently ongoing in Barcelona.

The relationship between Samsung and Apple has been a frosty one for years now, with the pair seemingly borrowing from one another when it comes to features and aesthetics – although admittedly, it’s normally Samsung borrowing from Apple.

Still, that was never going to stop Denison from poking Apple about the iPhone X and, in particular, that notch atop its display, as well as no fingerprint scanner on the device.

When we released the Infinity Display, most people had never seen anything like it. Its ground breaking design offered more screen in less space, and quickly set a new industry standard.

With the S9, we’ve built on this foundation, taking the same immersive end-to-end display, and refining it even further. We’ve created a design so sleek and unified, you can hardly tell where the screen ends.

And as always, you know, there’s no notch

But as can be seen in the video above, the crowd was completely silent and gave no reaction whatsoever to it. Count this into among one of the most cringeworthy moments in tech.

With that out of the way, Samsung also set about making sure that everyone was under no doubt that the new AR Emoji feature that it debuted alongside the Galaxy S9 is in any way copied from Apple’s very simlar Animoji. While both take a user’s facial expressions and turn them into on-screen actions, Samsung’s mobile chief D.J. Koh was quick to point out that Samsung didn’t borrow from Apple when interviewed by The Wall Street Journal about it.

He bristled at any notion Samsung was playing catch-up with Apple, as the human emojis took years of development, he added.

“Their approach and my approach is totally different,” said Mr. Koh, cautious not to mention Apple, a rival and components customer, by name. “I do work seriously based off my own roadmap.”

That’s unlikely to prevent the obvious comparisons given the fact that the only real difference between Animoji and AR Emoji is that Apple’s version uses pre-existing characters while the Samsung’s version creates a new 3D character, although as far as I can tell the only real similarity between Animoji and AR Emoji is that nobody will be using either by the end of 2018. Novelty just doesn’t last that long, especially if Samsung’s version is as bad as initial early reviews make it out to be.