Founders of SamMobile, Danny Dorresteijn, Martin Reinders and Johan Nenzen, have appointed me, Faryaab Sheikh, as the new Editor-In-Chief of SamMobile. I have been with SamMobile for over a year now, first as a News Writer, then as a Senior Editor and now as the Editor-In-Chief. We at SamMobile strongly believe that nothing can be perfect and there is always room for improvement. Since the birth of SamMobile, we have constantly been improving the website's design, functionality and overall user experience and releasing updates over a regular period of time, mostly with every million registered users. Today, we are launching SamMobile 3.0 but before I get into that, I believe that behind every successful company there is an idea and it is that very idea which brings the actual success into the company. So, before discussing all the new amazing features of SamMobile 3.0 and our future plans, I would like to give you guys a glimpse into our past.
On 14 June 2009, we launched Samsung-Firmwares, which we later had to change to SamFirmware due to a request from Samsung. With SamFirmware our focus was totally towards firmwares for Samsung devices, both official and test firmwares. Back then we were the only source from which users were able to obtain firmwares for their Samsung device. With the launch and success of the Galaxy S and the Galaxy S II, Samsung community had started to grow rapidly and with that we were able to reach 500,000 registered users in just two years. After watching the Samsung community grow rapidly day-by-day, we decided to increase our footprint. Here comes, SamMobile!
On 14 December 2011, SamMobile was born! The main reason behind SamFirmware’s success was the huge collection of firmwares, but with SamMobile our main goal was to show more interest in Samsung’s innovations in the mobile industry, which we were able to showcase by publishing product reviews, Samsung-related news and updates. However, we didn’t wanted to abandon our firmware services. We decided to merge SamFirmware into SamMobile by creating a separate Firmware Portal within the new website. We had to completely change the infrastructure of SamFirmware to get it compatible with WordPress, this process was very painful because this meant loosing all 500,000 registered members and starting everything from scratch again. Luckily, the community supported us at every moment, with over 1500-2500 new registrations every day.
It has been two years since the launch of SamMobile and in just two years our community has grown enormously with now over 2,000,000 registered members. Looking back, it took SamFirmware 2 years to reach 500,000 registered members, while SamMobile was able to reach to 2 Million members in the same time frame. Since its inception, SamMobile reached over 85+ million visitors, 45+ million unique visitors and over 250 million page views! Last year alone SamMobile served over 60+ million visitors, 35+ million unique visitors and 170+ million pages requests. Over 100,000 users register on SamMobile every month!
Over the past two years, SamMobile has built a great reputation among the tech industry mainly because of the excellent track record of breaking exclusive information regarding Samsung’s upcoming devices and software updates, and we plan to maintain that reputation in the future as well. For this we would like to thank our insiders (yes, you guys know who you are) because without them we wouldn’t be where we are today.
FACTS
– SamMobile serves 150,000 to 200,0000 unique visitors each day.
– More than 100,000 user registrations each month.
– SamMobile’s majority of visitors come from USA, followed by India and Brazil.
– Largest amount of unique visitors in a month record: 5,000,000 (December 2013).
Now enough of the past, let’s talk about the present and the future. We initially wanted to launch SamMobile 3.0 the day we reached to 2 million registered members but that happened earlier than we had anticipated and the website was still under heavy development. However, all is done now and you are probably reading this on the brand new version of SamMobile, unless something terrible has happened and zombies have attacked our servers and published this on Samsung’s website.
Everyone starts the year with new goals and objectives, and like everyone else we do the same. In the year of 2014, we would like to reach to 3 million registered site members, 250,000 visitors from all over the world with 750,000 to 1,000,000 page views each day. Also, we would like to break the 5 Million visitors record of December 2013 this year. Now let’s finally talk about the new stuff in SamMobile 3.0.
DESIGN
With SamMobile 3.0, we have completely revamped the design of the entire website which should improve the user experience significantly. Previously, the homepage was divided into four sections, Latest News, Reviews, Firmware News and our Social Media stream. It’s all gone now! Instead we have opted for a single stream of latest news with a section of archived posts from which users will be able to scroll through old posts. We have increased the width of the actual blog posts too, now we are able to fit in more words in less number of lines, which means less scrolling for you guys. We have implemented a sidebar, which is available through out the website. The sidebar features a live feed of our social media accounts, which includes Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and latest news. The compare module, which we introduced with SamMobile 2.0, has also received a complete design change. For now, the website isn’t responsive but team is working on it and should be ready till Q2.
FIRMWARE PORTAL
Firmware Portal has received the biggest design overhaul. In SamMobile 2.0, Firmware Portal’s design wasn’t much similar to the one we had on the main home page, which made the overall design inconsistent. This has now been fixed. Plus, we have added more information at various places, which should make the Firmware Portal easier to use by the end user. Since day one, our users have been requesting us to host the firmwares ourselves and provide direct downloads but, unfortunately, we weren’t able to do that because of the extremely high requirements. However, we have finally managed to work it all out and from today are enabling direct downloads for everyone. Yes, you read that right! We have finally worked out a way to host all firmwares ourselves. All previous firmwares’ links should be switched to direct download links by now as well. Users who hold a free SamMobile account will get around 400-500KB/s speeds, while users with SamMobile’s premium account will get unlimited download speeds. Keep in mind that we will only be hosting official firmwares and not test firmwares, for obvious reasons. So, we will still be using 3rd party file hosts for those.
FORUM
We have to admit that we weren’t much happy with our forums in SamMobile 2.0 and always thought that there was a lot to improve. With SamMobile 3.0, we are now using a completely flat design to match the rest of the website, and I think we have done a pretty good job here. We are tightening the moderation, because we simply can’t tolerate spam posts. Also, we are adding and removing some sections.
PREMIUM SERVICES
SamMobile’s premium services are only for exclusive premium members, the ones who have purchased a SamMobile premium account. Supporting our website by becoming a premium member will not be for nothing. Our premium services include: Premium forum (Special forum sections for premium members), Exclusive support (Our Samsung experts at your service), Weekly magazine (Exclusive e-magazine with fancy news) and Exclusive Monthly Giveaways!
Well, that’s about it folks! I would like to thank the entire team of SamMobile, especially our Website Administrator – Daniel Van Dorp who is always working behind the scenes to ensure that there aren’t any issues with your stay at SamMobile and he also manages all our website upgrades, Senior Editor – Michael Ramsewaksing for all his expertise in Bada and Tizen, Head of Digital – Dom Armstrong for handling all our video content, Director of News – Abhijeet Mishra for ensuring that every Samsung-related news content is published on SamMobile as soon as possible and our News Writers: Kunal Gangar and Harish Jonnalagadda.
Most importantly, I would like to thank YOU guys for always being there for us because without you we wouldn’t be where we are today! Also, don’t forget to leave your thoughts on SamMobile 3.0 in the comments section below; your feedback is very valuable to us. Thanks, once again!
