Cell phone manufacturers have to be intimidated with the rapid progress of the application store offered by Apple.  Apple has over 65,000 applications on their App store.  Application stores are beneficial to a cell phone manufacturer.  Apple has numerous applications created by third-party developers that have gone to make the iPhone more popular than Apple may have done alone.  Seeing this benefit, Samsung Mobile has decided to step their game up.  Their first step is to wine and dine the developers and they are playing it real smooth with this step.  Here is how they will pull it off:

• Who?  Samsung Mobile

What? Samsung Widget Software Developers Camp “developers will have a go at creating a widget to compete in one of five categories. The winner in each category will receive a 5,000-dollar prize, the best-in-show widget will earn its creator 20,000 dollars award.” {GSM Arena}

• When?  September 11th-13th, 2009
• Where?  San Francisco Hyatt Regency Hotel. {Cocktail event, catered and staffed meeting for 24 hours}
• Why?  Samsung Mobile needs to increase the widgets offered on their TouchWiz enabled phones (those that run on Windows Mobile, Symbian and Samsung proprietary OS)

We will see if Samsung Mobile will be able to pull this off. You may have your own opinion but if you need to get to San Francisco, I would say try purchasing your tickets through Orbitz.  They gave me a great deal a couple of months ago and I saved an extra $75 on my trip.