Samsung has laid off 25 of its 250 employees at its Ramat Gan R&D center. The fired employees worked in the analog and Asic sectors, which Samsung is outsourcing, while the R&D center is focusing on other areas. Samsung wishes to concentrate on mobile health. One example can already be seen on the S5 Galaxy smart phone, which has a fingerprint sensor for identifying pulse and blood pressure. The company will also develop a wearable computer for monitoring and health, and will bolster its activity in algorithms and software.

Samsung Israel’s Kobi Kalif: For years, Samsung has

been the market leader, and IDC should check its data.

“According to our review, IDC’s data is far from reality. In every review we conducted, we’re the leading manufacturer in Israel. For years, Samsung has been the market leader, and IDC should check its data,” Samsung Israel mobile division manager Kobi Kalif told “Globes” in response to a study which found that Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: APPL) outsold Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (KSX: 5930; LSE: SMSN) in the first quarter of 2014 in Israel.

Tablets are another category in which you’re going head-to-head against Apple. How do you see this category?

Kalif: ”We should work harder in this category. We’re now launching a number of new models and we’ll expand our foothold with marketing campaigns.”

In the next two weeks, Samsung will launch several new low-cost smartphones for NIS 1,000-2,800. “We see that the NIS 2,000 smartphone market is growing,” says Kalif. “People are seeking to replace handsets like the Galaxy S3 with a newer, cheaper model.”

Kalif previously worked for Motorola Mobility Israel, until it was sold to Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), which later closed Motorola Mobility operations in several counties, and he joined Samsung. He is considered the man who was behind the new contract with Samsung importer Suny Electronics Ltd. (TASE: SUNY), controlled by Ilan Ben-Dov. In February, the two companies signed a new six-year franchise agreement, under which Samsung Israel would sell devices directly to Israeli carriersCellcom Israel Ltd. (NYSE:CEL; TASE:CEL), Partner Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq: PTNR; TASE: PTNR), and Pelephone Communications Ltd., and Suny would forego its marketing exclusivity to retailers, which Samsung estimates accounts for 30% of sales.

Why did Samsung decide to give Suny a substantial part of its Israeli business?

“In 2012, Israel underwent far-reaching regulatory changes (the law to ban affiliation, which forced carriers to provide services to handsets they had not sold -T.H.) Samsung is committed to adapt to the new policy, with the goal of lowering prices and providing the best service to the Israeli consumer. Our objective is to focus on the open market, which is growing. We have an excellent supplier (Suny), and we want to focus its efforts.”

navigation company, which has developed smartphone

sensors.

Samsung is in talks to acquire indoor retail and shopping navigation company ShopCloud for $80-90 million, according to a report in the technology blog “Geektime” based on sources familiar with the details. The blog says that ShopCloud’s founders met with Samsung’s VP acquisitions last week.

in the Galaxy 4′s Knox architecture can be easily intercepted.

Researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber Security Labs have found a security breach in Samsung’s smartphones based on the Knox architecture. These smartphones include the Galaxy S4, and the breach, researchers believe, enables easy interception of data communications between the secure container and the external world including file transfers, emails and browser activity.

Samsung’s Knox architecture was approved by the US Defense Department last March.

The vulnerability was uncovered by Ph.D. student Mordechai Guri during an unrelated research task. Guri is part of a wider research team at the cyber security labs which focuses on mobile and other cyber related research topics. He said, “To us, Knox symbolizes state-of-the-art in terms of secure mobile architectures and I was surprised to find that such a big ’hole‘ exists and was left untouched. The Knox has been widely adopted by many organizations and government agencies and this weakness has to be addressed immediately before it falls into the wrong hands. We are also contacting Samsung in order to provide them with the full technical details of the breach so it can be fixed immediately.”

The Knox architecture features a regular phone environment as well as a secure container that is supposed to add security protection to the phone. All data and communications that take place within the secure container are protected and even if a malicious application should attack the non-secure part all the protected data should be inaccessible under all circumstances. However, the newly found breach can be used to bypass all Knox security measures. By simply installing an “innocent” app on the regular phone (in the non-secure container) all communications from the phone can be captured and exposed.

The Samsung Knox is based on TrustZone’s mobile virtualization platform which serves as the underlying infrastructure for the available protective measures. “To solve this weakness, Samsung may need to recall their devices or at least publish an over the air software fix immediately. The weakness found may require Samsung to re-think a few aspects of their secure architecture in future models,” said Dudu Mimran CTO of the Ben Gurion labs.