When Samsung announced a 24% decline in operating profits last month, it became clear that the company was going to have to do more to reestablish dominance in the high-end phone market. The Galaxy S5 didn’t do much for growth, but Samsung is planning on unveiling the Galaxy Note 4, its second top-of-the-line device of the year, on September 3rd at the IFA 2014 trade show. Unfortunately, as PCWorld has made abundantly clear, many analysts don’t think the Note 4 will be enough.
“I think Samsung is in a holding pattern at the moment. Any new device launch at this stage is really focused on stabilizing rather than regrowing its device business. For Samsung to revitalize its sales the company needs a revolutionary design, something like a foldable or bendable screen to shake up the market,” said Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics.
We don’t know what the Note 4 will look like yet, but it is rumored to feature a 2K resolution (2560 x 1440) 5.7-inch display, 1.3GHz Exynos octa-core processor or Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a 16-megapixel camera.
“I hope the Note 4 will have all those factors missing from the S5. For example, a premium design with a new design language that includes some metal instead of the plastic design of its existing products. If you look at the Note 2 and 3, and the Galaxy S4 and S5 from the front they all look the same,” said Counterpoint Technology Market Research’s Neil Shah.
The fact of the matter is that unless Samsung finds some way to entice consumers, Apple is going to dominate the high-end market this fall with the iPhone 6. If Apple’s new iPhone models really do have larger displays, Samsung won’t have anything else to poke fun at. It’s time that Samsung brought something new to the table.
