The Smartphone market is unstable, it has its ups and downs. Samsung announced its earnings guide for Q3 2014. The Korean giant expects a significant drop in profits over the same period last year about 60% to be precise.

The company expects to record profits of 4.1 trillion won (about $3.8 billion) from approximately 47 trillion won in sales. The latter are down 20% from this time last year.

Smartphone sales by Samsung are slightly up for the period. However, increased marketing costs and declining product prices hurt the company's bottom line.

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Reuters reports that Samsung is planning to invest the gargantuan $14.7 billion in a new chip-making factory over the next three years. That's the biggest investment the company has ever made into a single plant.

According to Samsung's plans, the plant is going to be built in Pyeongtaek, which is 75 km south of Seoul and create 150,000 jobs. Interestingly, the company hasn't made a final decision yet on whether the factory will create processors or memory chips.

But with Samsung estimating the new factory is going to be finished by the second half of 2017, there's a lot of time to make this decision. Rumors suggests Samsung is going to be making the upcoming Apple A9 chip, which will go into the company's future phones and tablets.

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Samsung is very proud of its Galaxy Alpha, so that the company today released an Infographic which tries to convince the world that the Alpha sets "a new standard for smartphone design".

The infographic reminds us that the Galaxy Alpha comes with a diamond-cut metal frame that makes it durable, in addition to a smooth back that should provide a firm grip. The handset's five color versions aren't forgotten (Black, White, Silver, Gold, Blue), and neither are its main features: an octa-core Exynos processor, 12 MP rear camera, 4.7-inch Super AMOLED display with 720 x 1280 pixels, and Android 4.4 KitKat. Check out the Infographic below!

Samsung announced earlier today it has began mass producing its latest 6Gb LPDDR3 Mobile DRAM chips. They're made using the 20nm manufacturing process and are designed with high performance smartphones and tablets in mind by achieving data transfer rates of up to 2,133Mbps.

A 3GB LPDDR3 package can now be made using four 6Gb LPDDR3 chips is 20% smaller and consumes 10% less energy than existing 3GB packages such as the one found in the Galaxy Note 4. The 20nm process also results in 30% productivity gain compared to the 30nm process.

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Reports of a more affordable variant of the Samsung Galaxy Alpha first surfaced last week. Back then we heard that Samsung was in development of an SM-A500 device for the midrange market.

The latest news surrounding the device involves a 13MP camera instead of the initially reported 8MP shooter, alongside the updated version of the TouchWiz User interface that Samsung introduced at IFA with its new Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Otherwise, the SM-A500 is expected to include a 5-inch 720 Super AMOLED screen, quad-core Snapdragon 400 CPU, and 16GB of expandable storage. Notably, the 2,330mAh battery is expected to be of the non-removable kind unlike on the Galaxy Alpha while a 5MP front-facer is also expected.

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