Samsung’s scale is such that when it chooses to change, the whole mobile industry feels the repercussions. So far, the key alterations from previous Galaxy S generations appear to be a move to an all-metal construction, a display that may be curved on one or both sides, and the repudiation of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors in favor of a full reliance on Samsung’s own Exynos. These factors all matter individually, but taken as a whole they mark a major departure from the almost cynical pragmatism with which Samsung has approached its phones in the past. Let’s address each one of them in turn.
Samsung’s problem is that all the things that caused its rapid growth in smartphones were things that were easily replicated both on the low end (Xiaomi etc.) and the high end (Apple). Samsung needs something unique for its smartphones, and aping Apple and HTC by moving to an all-metal construction is not going to do it, nor are gimmicky bent screens and whatnot.
It may already be too late.
If you’re writing off Samsung, it just means you’re young and stupid.
They’ll prevail. They always do.
Yeah, that’s what they said about Palm and Nokia a few years ago.
Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results.
I don’t care if they go with an all metal construction or not, as long as they don’t lose the removable battery. That’s one thing they still have over the majority of their competition. I’d rather have that than the heart rate monitor or the finger print scanner.
battery is NOT remobable.
if that’s true then i’m really done even more with samsung. allowing at&t to lock the bootloader on my galaxy s4 made me very mad already.
According to this, it looks like the battery WON’T be removable:
http://www.knowyourmobile.com/mobile-phones/samsung-galaxy-s6/22712…
Darn them!! As Thom very aptly mentioned, Samsung just removed what was probably the most important feature to Galaxy owners, and alienated their existing customers in an attempt to appeal to new customers that are already satisfied with Apple or HTC products. Idiots.
Well, this pretty much does it for me. I’ve owned a LOT of expensive name-brand Android smartphones, and **all but one** have completely broken or had serious issues. (And I take meticulous care of my phones.) I don’t see any more reasons to prefer expensive name-brand devices that constantly break if they won’t even give me the hardware features I want, like a removable battery. I think that when my current Galaxy S3 fails (probably any day now given my experience) I’ll just buy cheap, disposable smartphones from the Chinese stores and use them until they break. Here I come chiPhone!
I’ve had 3 iPhones in the same timeframe Friend A has had 7 Androids.
I’ve had 3 iPhones in the same timeframe Sister in Law has had 1 iPhone and 4 Androids.
I’ve had 3 iPhones in the same timeframe Friend B has had 8 Androids.
My experience is that iPhones last forever, with generally happy users, and Android phones get replaced more commonly, seemingly for quality issues, and only hear about the new Android, not the 8 month old one that was “better than the iPhone” until it wasn’t.
I’m sorry to say, but your personal experience is completely irrelevant.
I’ve had exactly 3 phone the last 8 years, and all of them were Samsung. The first on the list was a “feature”-phone, monochrome screen. I used this phone for 3 years before upgrading to the next Samsung phone, also a feature phone with a full keyboard and also lasted 3 years. I currently own a Samsung Galaxy Nexus that I bought off contract for $300 new, lowering my monthly wireless payments by $20. By the way, none of the mentioned phones ever had a case, and they were all dropped more than a few times.
Assuming your first iPhone was the original (launch in 2007, 8 years ago) you have had exactly the same experience with as I’ve had. And your friend A, sister-in-law and friend B all have had similar experiences with the Android phone that my friends and family have had with their iPhones.
And honestly, I don’t understand your “happiness” argument. Wasn’t it the iPhone 4G that lost tower connectivity when held a certain way? Apple’s response: buy a case. Saying people like the iPhone because they are well built and tested is simply untrue. People buy the iPhone because it has an Apple logo on the back.
ya right. you say my experience doesn’t matter then you take 2 paragraphs explaining yours. YMMV is a no-brainer.
i have had some bad iPhones, the 3G in particular, but in general it’s been a tank for me, and millions others.
citing “antenna gate” is kinda weak, i have a 4 and haven’t had it in a case in years. it’s not dropped a single call due to that perceived problem. i guess some people on some carriers got it, but again, YMMV.
put it this way, the world would really be backwards if the $500 phone needed replaced more than the $100 phone. i get that apple makes a premium product, but reliability is not really a big problem of theirs. plus genius bar fixes most things on the spot, or overnight at worst.
I guess my point completely flew over your head. What I meant should have been made clear by the third paragraph. I listed my experience to show that for every example of an iPhone lasting a long time and the myriad of Android manufacturers’ phone lasting a short time, there is an equal amount of examples of the myriad of Android phones lasting a long time and the iPhone lasting a short time.
Just to make sure I drive it home, the point is: 4 people’s experience is not a statistic, it is just 4 people’s isolated experience. Just like there are people who have problems with Android phones, there are people who have problems with iPhones, including yourself, apparently. Hopefully that’s clearer.
i got it, but i know this before i post the first time. of course it’s just my experience. but there’s statistics and surveys and sales numbers that show apple builds a good product, in general, across the board.
they also market well, and they also support customers well. it’s all a function of their business which has made them very profitable in the last 10 years.
i’d actually like to see android phones really take off into something different than the iPhone.
there should be awesome specialty ones, like a video phone, a camera phone, a musician phone, a medical phone, a construction phone, a kids phone. that is where they could pick off more apple customers, by differentiating their hardware, not software.
Good product I suppose, if you dont mind Big Brother. Case in point: I’ve just moved to an area where 2.4 ghz wifi is so crowded that it’s unuseable. There are, at minimum, 27 networks in range at all times at full power. To use any wifi here, 5 ghz is necessary. Why’s this important? Well, I have two phones: a moto G first gen and an iPhone 4S. The 4S has definitely lasted longer than the 4G, which died the other day due to nand flash failure. So I pulled out the 4S and wanted to update it. The 4S has no 5 ghz wifi (neither did the G) but guess what? I have a 5 gb data plan. I’ve used 2 gb. I want to download a 100 mb or so software update… and Apple says no. Excuse me? It’s my fucking data. I pay for it, and I manage it. Yet I have Big Brother telling me I’m not allowed to download a tiny os update? Seriously? I’ll be getting a new phone, and it certainly will have 5 ghz wifi. But it will not be an iPhone. It only took this incident to remind me why I got away from iOS in the first place and that was within an hour of having to pull out that damned iPhone.
if you have had your S3 from back when it was the newest generation, then it has held out fairly well for a smart phone. My current S4 is about the same age my iPhone 4 was when i just could not stand how slow it had become and replaced it.
The S4 is showing its age, that silly silver plastic on the side is more white than silver now, but other than that it still works fine.
Anyway, my real point is that i thought it was nice that the battery is replaceable, the reality is that i actually don’t care. I don’t want to fiddle around with multiple batteries anyway, and since i can’t tell a difference in endurance compared to when it was new i have a feeling it will last until the phone is replaced eventually. My guess is that 95% or more of the users are like me, and a replacable battery is just not a big deal. I only care about SD cards because they can add more storage, i never change it, i would rather have the S4 came with 64 gb or even 128 gb internal storage than having to add the SD card in the first place.
I’ve tried a number of cheap, well-featured Chinese phones, and my conclusion was: a solid build -in all areas- is really important. I’m now on an ASUS Zenfone 6, and it’s the best I ever owned (Nexus 4 is second). I would recommend Taiwan or Korea over China is what I’m saying.
Yeah.. it’s “Yet another phone”, Whooptie-do. What’s there that’s revolutionary or innovative about the O/S that makes it news-worthy here? ..or is this now a “design discussion” site?
🙁
The landscape of operating systems has changed over the years. I know some will disagree with me, but unfortunately it appears that interest in developing, and in following, new operating systems has waned.
On the PC there are the three major OS, Linux, Windows and OSX, as well as a few niche players such as the BSDs. This situation has become very stable over the last decade.
Similarly on the mobile side there are two main OS (at least as far as mainstream media is concerned), Android and iOS. Again there are some other (debatably) minor players. This isn’t quite as stable as the PC OS, but new players don’t come along every month (or even every year).
The point is, that a lot of the news in operating systems today is to do with their uptake, and how they are being presented to the end users. When the worlds biggest provider of Android hardware decides to change that hardware it effects where that OS is headed, both indirectly and directly.
I do however wish for more contributions to this site by people who are involved in OS research, as opposed to the more commercial side of operating systems (such as uptake, newest features in major OS etc).
Why wasting time into developing another OS ? There’s already dozens. Have you tried FreeBSD ? Minix3 ? Haiku ? Now you’ll tell me that they are unusable for daily usage and serious business, that Windows and Linux just do it already. What was your question in the first place ?
“It may already be too late”
Samsung reminds me a little of Sony back when they were developing Palm PDAs. Sony had brought lots of innovative designs, pushed processor speeds and enhanced the Palm experience against the onslaught of Windows powered handhelds. They finally left the US market because of sagging sales.
Samsung’s biggest challenge is customer loyalty. You take a look at the long term players in the tech field – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and many others – they all have something that keeps people coming back. Samsung doesn’t have anything that can keep their users coming back and it’s beginning to show. Even the OS they ship is tied to the Play Store. It’s the Play Store, above all else, that brings people back… to Google.
I’m certain they’ve seen the long-term problems for a while now and until they’re ready (Tizen, Crackle or whatever they have cooking), their livelihood depends on cranking out (pretty good, if not conservative) hardware.
The reality is that nobody – including Apple – will be making much money out of phones in 2-3 years. Entry level prepaid Android phones now have hardware (quad core 1GB Ram) approaching that of the iPhone 5C at less than 1/5th the price. The only real ‘weaknesses’ are the screen resolution and cameras. That will be fixed within two years.
That’s exactly Samsung’s way to compete – build the hardware so they can have bigger numbers in the specs.
That doesn’t help when using the software is a string of annoyances.
I suspect that Samsung (and most of the other Android manufacturers) will switch to plain Android fairly soon. Most of the low end phones already have.
Wrong. Apple’s phones will cost five times as much as similarly specced phones, sell a bit less than they do now (as insignificant yearly upgrades make little sense), and will be much cheaper to produce. They’ll make money as long as they’re fashionable.
The reality is that iOS marketshare will eventually shrink to the stage where developers start to ignore it. Then the collapse will be very sudden. The iPhone is simply repeating the Mac saga.
Very unlikely. Even if the market share declines to Mac levels developers will still be interested, just like they are interested in the Mac.
At that point, phones will have moved to web apps, and developer support will be irrelevant.
Hardly. If the current trend is anything to go by, each os will have different ways to access the hardware even through a web app. Even if a standard were to be created, you know everyone’s going to enhance their individual implementations just that little bit. So yes, it’s possible we may move to web apps by then (though I doubt it) but it most certainly will not make developer support irrelevant.
Funny. Those phones already exist, and yet Apple is making more money than ever. when you’re wrong for so long sometimes it pays to re-examine your logic rather than sticking to the same argument. People have been predicting the imminent demise of Apple for decades.
Much of the press are very determined to declare the death of Samsung … because of one record Apple quarter … a quarter in which the rest of the industry declined to put out any new products to compete with the iPhone 6 launch…
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201408-201501
interestingly despite all the hubbub iPhones are down, androids are up
Edited 2015-02-05 06:56 UTC
Can’t build an iPhone without samsung.
Probably can’t build many apple products without samsung. samsung is one of the primary suppliers to apple.
That’s part of the reason apple/samsung are not friends in the consumer space — it’s irritating to compete in the product space with your vendors.
Samsung agitating Apple in marketing is in bad taste, since the two make so much money with/from each other.
It would be like Apple doing the switcher marketing even if MS made 30% of the parts in a Mac. Of course, they don’t. But Samsung parts are all over Apple products.
Your style is becoming annoying, Thom.
Samsung have some great products. Unfortunately I have never seen or used one.. despite using the S2, S3, S4, the original note and numerous tablets. When I used the earlier versions they had their own style that was a remarkable copy of the iPhone. Which was probably a good strategy because early android builds didn’t have very much artistic or design flare. Then when Android started to really refine the design with 4.x and HOLO Samsung never caught up. thier phones remained familiar to the users who had the previous generation but they felt dated when compared to recent versions of Vanilla Android or HTC’s sense. All the other android vendors (Sony, LG, HTC, Motorola) all developed new themes and enhancements to the design work that Google was working at… Not samsung. No amount of crappy bloat ware applications will cover up the underbelly of bad design that’s been organically grown upon.
Now 3-4 years later they have a new phone which thanks to moores law will be faster, etc etc.. but it will not feel much faster than the previous phones simply because they have not done the heavy lifting to improve their technical debt. I have read recently that they plan to move their core apps into the play store, but I really doubt that will improve the situation.
Samsung has so many models with only minor variations between them it is not actually clear what the distinctions are and why they vary so drastically in cost/price. HTC, Motorola, Sony have all simplified their android lines so they can focus their efforts.. all have increasing sales by volume (units sold).. time will tell if Samsung is not at it’s peak.
The real reason Samsung is losing market share is very simple. Their low end phones are massively overpriced. The entry level Samsungs cost about 50-100% more than comparable models from ZTE, HTC, Huawei, Xioami, Nokia etc.
As people already know, Samsung’s greatest weakness is the software development.
Yeah, nothing in the article addressed Samsung’s terrible android skins and mods.
Its a very insular software system they always create. The first Gear watch … only worked with a Samsung phone. That kind of lock in is stupid. The hardware has been good enough for me to buy multiple phones, wipe the software and replace with cyanogen, but not anymore with cheap nexus phones and carrier plans that don’t punish you for buying a phone separately.
I own a S4 mini for two years now and am absolutely satisfied with it. A removable battery and the option to add an SD card where reasons for me to buy this phone because I had a iPhone 3G before and wanted to be a bit on the future safe side for a while.
It is probably true that a removable battery is not important for 95% of the users and I’m not even sure I need this feature but I like the idea of a SD card slot because I can decide myself how much storage I want to add or even upgrade myself if I need more of it.
The Galaxy S6 will bring change to the entire mobile industry… Like 2 full days battery life on a single charge with moderate usage?
So they get rid of the removeable battery, and it’s yet another slab with a screen. How exactly is this going to change the mobile industry? Looks to me like a copy of everything that’s already been done. They’ve even removed one of the features that made them different.
The Note 3 was the best phone on the market DESPITE Touchwiz crap. Then Note 4 IS the best phone on the market, and rumor has it it will debloat with the lollipop update. Plus Gear VR. Samsung is the big dog. Even if the s6 is a misstep (a little early to tell imho), it’s not going anywhere any time soon. Because the Note 5 will not have the same mistakes as the s6, and will probably be as good or better than the Note 4, which is the best phone on the planet right now.