Samsung's latest financial reporting session showed disappointing sales of the S6, and they admitted they underestimated the demand for the S6 Edge. By the time they figured out the mistake and increased Edge shipments, it was too late...the buzz had worn off. I see more of the same for the Note/S6 Edge +, as it seems Samsung is not doing a good job of understanding what their consumers want.
I believe the root cause is a dramatic shift in Samsung's approach to phones and tablets. They want to be Apple 2.0, but have missed the bulk of the premium phone market already as most people who can afford the top of the line phones are seeing fewer reasons to upgrade every year for incremental feature enhancements. They have shifted the design of their top tier tablets to the same diminsions of iPads, but waited to do this until iPad sales had already started a large decline....again, too late to the premium game.
There used to be complaints about Samsung's cheap hardware design (plastic backs, etc), but the phones still sold well. I believe they did need to improve in the hardware design area, and this year's models are indeed beautiful. However, they dropped many of the features that were differentiators between them and Apple, like removeable batteries, SD cards, IR blasters, water proofing (for the S5 anyway), etc. So now they have fewer feature advantages, little to no price advantage, have alienated a significant portion of their core users, and are facing a rapidly increasing set of Android competitors that offer good or better quality phones often at much lower prices.
I hope I'm wrong. My last 3 phones have been the Note 4, Note 3, and S3. But as nice as the new phones look, things that matter to me are no longer available in the Samsung top tier. I'm gonna start looking at other vendors, and I'm guessing many others will as well.
What do you think?
I believe the root cause is a dramatic shift in Samsung's approach to phones and tablets. They want to be Apple 2.0, but have missed the bulk of the premium phone market already as most people who can afford the top of the line phones are seeing fewer reasons to upgrade every year for incremental feature enhancements. They have shifted the design of their top tier tablets to the same diminsions of iPads, but waited to do this until iPad sales had already started a large decline....again, too late to the premium game.
There used to be complaints about Samsung's cheap hardware design (plastic backs, etc), but the phones still sold well. I believe they did need to improve in the hardware design area, and this year's models are indeed beautiful. However, they dropped many of the features that were differentiators between them and Apple, like removeable batteries, SD cards, IR blasters, water proofing (for the S5 anyway), etc. So now they have fewer feature advantages, little to no price advantage, have alienated a significant portion of their core users, and are facing a rapidly increasing set of Android competitors that offer good or better quality phones often at much lower prices.
I hope I'm wrong. My last 3 phones have been the Note 4, Note 3, and S3. But as nice as the new phones look, things that matter to me are no longer available in the Samsung top tier. I'm gonna start looking at other vendors, and I'm guessing many others will as well.
What do you think?
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