Samsung's S7 May Fall Just Shy of Innovation
Samsung's
forthcoming Galaxy S7 smartphone will have several new features,
including a pressure-sensitive display like the one available on the
iPhone 6s, according to a report published Monday in The Wall Street Journal.
The S7 also will have a USB Type-C port, which will make for faster
charging; a camera optimized for low-light photography; and possibly a
retina scanner and an external memory card slot in some versions, the
report said. The camera lens will be flush with the back of the phone
instead of bulging out as the Galaxy S6's lens does.
As it did with the Galaxy S6, Samsung reportedly will offer two
versions of the S7, one a premium curved-screen device to be named the
"Galaxy S7 Edge."
"The smartphone market is all about keeping up with the Joneses, and
Apple has had its fair share of rule-making features," remarked Ramon
Llamas, a research manager at IDC.
"Then again, Samsung did start the phablet craze," he told TechNewsWorld.
The Galaxy S7 series reportedly will be available in the United
States in mid-March after being announced at the Mobile World Congress
in Barcelona, Spain, in late February.
Most of the new features to be included in the S7 are widely available
in competitors' devices, and one, the microSD card slot, is returning to
the Galaxy family after having been dropped in the Galaxy S6 series.
There have been rumors of a USB Type-C port for the S7 since this
fall. It's available already on smartphones from some makers, including
LG Electronics and Huawei Technologies. It's one of the technologies
Apple reportedly is testing for the iPhone 7.
Fujitsu released a smartphone with a retina scanner earlier this
year, as did ZTE. Its Grand S3, available in China, also offers retinal
scanning.
"No vendor wants to be left out in the cold as one of the few who didn't adopt a new technology," IDC's Llamas said.
Taking on the Competition
Apple is the only maker that's a threat to Samsung at the high end.
"The S7 is really competing head-on with the iPhone," said David McQueen, a research director at
ABI Research.
"Most other Android vendors -- such as Motorola/Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE, LG
and Sony -- have tried and failed to compete at the high end."
The recently launched US$700
BlackBerry Priv
is "an obvious exception," he told TechNewsWorld, but "I'm not so sure
that's going to fare well against Apple and Samsung at that price point,
despite the obvious security benefits and hard keyboard."
Shoring up Samsung Sales
Sales of the Galaxy S6 reportedly have not hit the
70 million units Samsung predicted at launch. Deutsche Bank pegged sales at about 45 million, according to
media reports.
Samsung has offered consumers a
$100 Google Play credit to trade in their iPhones for an S6.
It offered a $300 gift bundle of accessories to new purchasers of the
Galaxy S6 family or the Galaxy Note 5 to boost holiday sales last
month.
The new features for the Galaxy S7 aren't likely to increase sales,
Llamas predicted, because they "are incremental at best, and by
themselves don't represent reasons for a jump-start. What end users want
to see is not what these features can do, per se, but what these
features can do for them."
While the new features make the Galaxy S7 even more Apple-like, "the
problem Samsung and Apple, to some extent, face is how to make the new
iteration of their flagship device different enough from last year's
version to entice users to upgrade," ABI's McQueen pointed out.
"This is becoming ever harder to achieve," he said. "All [the
flagships] look and feel the same, and are packed with very similar
features, so it can ... boil down to brand strength, ecosystem and
price."