Samsung's Got Plans to Take Down Apple

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Samsung last night hosted an event in Sunnyvale, Calif. -- in the heart of Silicon Valley -- with its senior executives who had flown in from Korea and who laid out several of the technology broadsides the company intends to launch against Apple(AAPL) over the coming year.

Samsung entered into a more direct set of battles against Apple in 2010 (Galaxy S smartphone, Galaxy Tab), and this intensified greatly in 2011. The key areas include smartphones, tablets, laptops and even the courts, where Apple has accused Samsung of things such as "trade dress," i.e., making several parts of the consumer experience look just like Apple's iPhone and iPad in particular.

At last night's event, Samsung's senior executives showed a bunch of slides pertaining to the technologies it intends to incorporate into its lineup over the next year to gain market share in the smartphone and tablet areas in particular.

Let's go over them in turn:

Tablet displays: Samsung announced that it will offer a tablet in 2012 with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, and that it is working with CPU/GPU providers to find enough horsepower to drive that kind of a high-resolution display with sufficient speed. Apple is widely assumed to be working on the same for the iPad, and potentially has in mind to offer this product already in September or October of 2011.

All I can say is that both companies will offer such a product as fast as they can get it working and that they can mass produce it without some insanely high cost premium. Odds are that this will not happen until the first half of 2012, but perhaps Samsung or Apple can surprise us.

Smartphone displays: Samsung announced that it can produce a "dual screen" smartphone which looked to me to be extremely similar to the Kyocera Echo which is offered by Sprint(S) starting about one month ago. This is a unique form factor in the market today, and if you read the reviews of this device carefully you will see that most reviews love the displays, but had other concerns about the device that Samsung should be able to remedy relatively easily. I think this could be an important ace in Samsung's arsenal for 2012. I don't see any beginnings of a rumor to suggest that Apple has something similar in mind for that time frame.