Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets rake in over 20 million pre-orders
The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge handsets were only unveiled just over a week ago (March 1st) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but that hasn’t stopped Samsung’s latest Galaxy flagships from raking in over 20 million pre-orders. That’s a decent chunk of change, especially when the entry-level S6 is priced at €700 ($761) while the S6 Edge, that won the MWC’s award for Best New Device, commands a higher price of €850 ($924). This should go some way to helping Samsung’s share price recover from its 3-year low.
An executive said that the unnamed carrier he works for had come away with a positive impression of both the Galaxy S6 variants, going on to state that:
“Samsung received some 20 million pre-orders for the S6 and S6 Edge – 15 million of S6 and 5 million of the S6 Edge from mobile carriers. This is the record.”
The fact that the Edge has received 5 million pre-orders means that smartphones with curved displays are no longer just niche devices like the Note Edge is. Many manufacturers would be extremely happy to get 5 million pre-orders for a flagship handset. It should be noted that the 20 million pre-orders placed by the carriers is an estimate of how many handsets they will sell and not firm orders placed by consumers.
Source: KoreaTimes
Come comment on this article: Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets rake in over 20 million pre-orders
Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets rake in over 20 million pre-orders
The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge handsets were only unveiled just over a week ago (March 1st) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but that hasn’t stopped Samsung’s latest Galaxy flagships from raking in over 20 million pre-orders. That’s a decent chunk of change, especially when the entry-level S6 is priced at €700 ($761) while the S6 Edge, that won the MWC’s award for Best New Device, commands a higher price of €850 ($924). This should go some way to helping Samsung’s share price recover from its 3-year low.
An executive said that the unnamed carrier he works for had come away with a positive impression of both the Galaxy S6 variants, going on to state that:
“Samsung received some 20 million pre-orders for the S6 and S6 Edge – 15 million of S6 and 5 million of the S6 Edge from mobile carriers. This is the record.”
The fact that the Edge has received 5 million pre-orders means that smartphones with curved displays are no longer just niche devices like the Note Edge is. Many manufacturers would be extremely happy to get 5 million pre-orders for a flagship handset. It should be noted that the 20 million pre-orders placed by the carriers is an estimate of how many handsets they will sell and not firm orders placed by consumers.
Source: KoreaTimes
Come comment on this article: Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets rake in over 20 million pre-orders
HTC has a plan to get you to purchase a One M9 over the iPhone
It looks like HTC has a plan to tackle the high-end smartphone market. As we all know, HTC has been working hard at building a gorgeous phone over the last few years and with general success at doing so. Even so, HTC hasn’t been able to chip into the Apple/Samsung dominated smartphone market and as such HTC must show how the One M9 differentiates itself from both Android phones and the iPhone 6. Well, HTC Americas president Jason Mackenzie seems to to know this and has hinted that HTC has a plan in place to do so.
In a Business Insider interview at MWC this year, Mackenzie teased an upcoming announcement that will come in ahead of the M9 launch later this spring that will help HTC push the One M9. It’s an announcement that we’ll get later this month. Here’s what he said.
Come comment on this article: HTC has a plan to get you to purchase a One M9 over the iPhone
Samsung will likely release a Galaxy S 6 Active sometime this year
If you keep up with Samsung’s product line and which devices they typically refresh, it shouldn’t surprise you that Samsung is likely to release an Active version of the Galaxy S 6 sometime this year.
Twitter user @upleaks has tweeted about a new Samsung device with the model number SM-G890A, which is fairly similar to the SM-G870A, which was AT&T’s Galaxy S 5 Active. It’s pure speculation at this point, but Samsung is usually pretty predictable about this kind of thing.
No other details about the device have surfaced, but you can bet it’ll be much more rugged than the Galaxy S 6, including having a tougher frame and being waterproof. Maybe they’ll bring the SD card back with this one?
source: @upleaks
Come comment on this article: Samsung will likely release a Galaxy S 6 Active sometime this year
Samsung sees record Galaxy S6 pre-orders; tops 20 million
Just last week, Samsung took the wraps off ‘Project Zero’ and unveiled a radically redesigned Galaxy S6 and even more radical Galaxy S6 edge. Samsung employed a premium design which features an aluminum chassis and Gorilla Glass 4 on both the front and back of the device. Now, it seems as if the complete redesign has paid off as Samsung has recorded a record number of pre-orders.
According to the South Korean manufacturer, they have received over 20 million orders for both the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge combined. It breaks down to 15 million Galaxy S6 units and 5 million Galaxy S6 edge units. Now, the device isn’t up for pre-order just yet, so this represents orders from mobile carriers and not the final customers.
This is definitely music to Samsung’s ears after they received much criticism for the design on previous devices such as the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5. They were often criticized for the plastic design and lackluster specifications. The Galaxy S6 and S6 edge not only feature a ‘premium’ design, but also feature top of the line specs.
It is anyone’s guess how well the device(s) will sell when it comes to consumers, but this is a very good start.
The post Samsung sees record Galaxy S6 pre-orders; tops 20 million appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge already receive record pre-orders
It has been just a week since Samsung officially announced their latest flagship devices, the Galaxy S6 and curved Galaxy S6 Edge. In that short amount of time, Samsung has reportedly already broken their own pre-order record, clocking in 20 million combined pre-orders so far.
This news comes out of the Korea Times, saying that Samsung has wracked up 15 million pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S6 and 5 million pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge.
We were at MWC this past week to bring you all the details of all of the latest Android device announcements, including Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. As such, there is little more I have to say today that you do not already know about the devices, so, let’s revisit our previous coverage.
- Samsung Galaxy S6 hands-on and first impressions
- Samsung Galaxy S6 officially announced: here’s what you need to know
- A closer look at the Galaxy S6’s Exynos 7420 SoC
- What the tech world thinks about the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC One M9
- Samsung Galaxy S6 Color Comparison
- Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Color Comparison
- Samsung explains how they made the Galaxy S6 and Edge so ‘perfect’
- HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S6 prices spotted in contest rules
- Grab Samsung’s Galaxy S6 apps and wallpapers here
Head on over to the Korea Times to see all they had to say about the announcement, we must say, 20 million pre-orders is a great start for Samsung, we’re curious to see if that results in a matching number of actual sales.
Before I forget, we are giving away a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge ourselves. Would you like to try to win one for yourself?
Samsung Galaxy S6
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What makes Samsung’s mobile VR consumer-ready? Marketing
A consumer release is en route for Gear VR. Hey, alright! If you’ve been paying attention, you might realize the problem with that first sentence, though. Think for a few minutes, I’ll be here. Give up? Well, here’s the answer: Unlike Oculus’ still-in-prototype Rift headset, you can go to Best Buy’s website today, throw down $200 and, boom, you’ll have a head-mounted virtual reality display. Just like that. Okay, you’ll need a Galaxy Note 4 too. But still, it already exists.
What’s largely separating the “consumer” Gear VR from the currently available Innovator Edition is a marketing push from Samsung. “We’ve got a plan now; we’ve got a date,” Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack said during his lengthy (and dense!) presentation at the Game Developer’s Conference this week. “You can kind of mark it on the calendars. Oculus is going to go for it as hard as we can [with] broad consumers, trying to sell as many units as possible, unleashing Samsung [marketing] with the next Gear VR.”
So essentially, when the Note 5 gets its multimillion-dollar marketing blitz, the consumer version of Gear VR will too. This all sounds a little like double-talk, though, considering how well-received the current Gear VR’s been to this point. And Carmack’s aware of that. He seems hopeful that older hardware will get a retroactive boost from the new awareness. It’s what he sees as hitting an “infection vector” for VR. In so many words, he means that it won’t be sitting in your “VR cave” where you’re tethered to a high-end PC that’s going to push virtual reality into the mainstream; it’ll be tech like Gear VR.
The current Note 4 Gear VR (left) and Galaxy S6/edge Gear VR (right) — not many differences!
“When we say we’re ready, which is really on Oculus from a platform structure, software and content level, we’re going to be able to sort of back-unlock the promotion and sales of multiple products there,” Carmack said. He continued that Samsung’s hardware “probably” could’ve gone wide with the Gear VR available currently, but that Oculus is taking the hit for not having enough stuff that everyone would expect to be there at launch. Namely, more software, more paid apps, in-app purchases and internationalization.
“We’re still not ready for Samsung to go out and do their blitz,” he said. “We expect when everything is ready, Samsung can go out. You’ll see ads everywhere; [Gear VR will] be in all the cellphone stores, all these things that we really wanted and sort of expected to do in the beginning” will be in place.
So don’t worry that the Gear VR you might already own, or the Galaxy S6-powered Gear VR, is somehow deficient (Carmack says there’ll only be “minor tech improvements”) compared to the one you’ll be inundated with later this year — that’s just Samsung’s marketing department talking. Carmack’s entire speech is just below, and the Gear VR bits run roughly from the 15-minute to 30-minute mark.
Don’t miss out on all the latest from GDC 2015! Follow along at our events page right here.
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Wearables, HD, Mobile, Samsung
Market share numbers for January show almost no changes from last year
ComScore has reported their numbers for the US smartphone market share for November 2014 through January 2015. The numbers are almost identical to how things looked three months ago, with Apple claiming the top spot, Samsung close at #2, and LG, Motorola, and HTC pulling up the next three places.
In total market share, Apple still held the crown, but their numbers dipped by roughly half a percent. Samsung’s market share sat at 29.3%, which was exactly the same in October of 2014, and Motorola’s market didn’t grow or shrink either. LG showed some improvement, but HTC took a slight dip.
As far as operating systems go, Android is still the top dog with over half of the market, but that’s split up among several manufacturers. These numbers look a little different globally, but in the US, Apple still holds an edge over Android OEMs.
source: ComScore
Come comment on this article: Market share numbers for January show almost no changes from last year
Note 2 takes a bullet for a police officer, Samsung gives him a Galaxy S6
In a bizarre story that’s becoming a lot more common place, a smartphone protected a person from taking a bullet. According to a news item coming out of Thailand, a Galaxy Note 2 saved a police officer’s life.
According to the report, Pol Maj Gen Sophon Thonglorm of the Mae Rim police station Chiang Mai carried the phone at the left side of his waist, and was shot by a suspect earlier this week. The bullet, instead of hitting him, hit the phone first. While the bullet did make it through the phone and into Thonglorm, the Note 2 slowed the velocity of the bullet so much that the injury was not life threatening.
That said, the phone went from being usable to nothing than a story piece and a paper weight. That story, took off on social media in Thailand and the story caught the attention of Samsung Thailand. The company offered Thonglorm the new Galaxy S6 on top of paying for his travel to pick up the phone in Bangkok, to which, he accepted.
“I am happy that Samsung will give me a new phone,” he said.
source: Thai Visa
via: SamMobile
Come comment on this article: Note 2 takes a bullet for a police officer, Samsung gives him a Galaxy S6
How serious are you about virtual reality?
The absolute best/worst virtual reality stock photo we could find
Are you prepared to dedicate a room in your house to virtual reality? Perhaps you’re a little less crazy than me, but you’re okay with a wire running across your living room to a headset? Or maybe both of those sound crazy to you, but a headset that can plug into your phone is okay?
These are the emerging options for virtual reality: a medium finally coming into its own, that’s poised to disrupt industries and hairdos the world over.
Polygon‘s Ben Kuchera sent me this fascinating piece last week, written by Robert McGregor, which compares virtual reality to swimming pools. Stay with me. The long and short of the analogy is this: Both concepts are incredibly compelling, and both require a very serious investment for maximum impact. You can have fun with a kiddie pool (Google Cardboard), but you can have a lot more fun with a multi-level, ornate swimming pool (HTC Vive).
With VR, as it stands right now, there are distinct tiers. I’ve broken out four here, but I’d love to hear arguments for more distinct tiers. And no, I’m not including augmented reality solutions; VR and AR are, currently, distinct mediums.
TIER 1: Google Cardboard
The kiddie pool analogy with Cardboard is apt: It offers a great taste of VR, with none of the comfort, fidelity or depth that other headsets offer. It also costs next to nothing and works with nearly any phone (Android, and some apps also support iOS). The benefits of Cardboard are ease-of-use (accessibility) and price (accessibility).
It is the ultimate trade-off of low barrier to entry versus depth of experience — no one is spending more than 15 minutes in a Cardboard. Zero people. Even if you could, you wouldn’t; go figure, it’s not that comfortable pushing a piece of cardboard to your face.
Those aren’t knocks against Cardboard, but a comparative measurement. Putting someone in Cardboard remains the easiest way to give an interested person a quick VR demo. That cannot be oversold: Cardboard is very easy, and that’s a crucial component for the adoption of a new medium. It works with basically any smartphone! There aren’t any headstraps or controllers! It doesn’t cost very much money!
And hey, if you’d never experienced a pool of water, a kiddie pool is a pretty exciting first experience.
TIER 2: Gear VR
One gigantic step up from Cardboard, in both experience and cost, is Samsung’s Gear VR. The South Korean phone giant teamed with Facebook-owned Oculus VR on a phone-powered experience that offloads some functionality to the headset: a touchpad, a gyrometer and lenses (among other bits). There’s a strap, and you’ll need to do some fiddling to get it set up, but it’s mostly plug-and-play with your Galaxy Note 4 phone (and soon the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge as well).
Sure, you need to own a very expensive, brand-new phone to use Gear VR. And sure, you need to shell out another $200 to buy the headset. And yeah, after that, real games cost money in Gear VR. But the games are such a tremendous step up in depth and engagement from the experiences you get with something like Cardboard that it’s all worth it.
If we’re sticking to McGregor’s simile, Gear VR is the gym/sports club membership that grants you regular access to a swimming pool. A full, real pool! But it’s not yours and there’s limited access and other people are in it and whatever else. There’s no depth-tracking in Gear VR, and your experiences are limited by the Note 4’s processing power, but it’s a great second step in the VR continuum. And a pretty accessible one at that!
TIER 3: Morpheus
Yet another massive step up from Gear VR and similar experiences is Sony’s Project Morpheus: a highly capable VR headset with a high-res built-in screen, powered by the fairly capable PlayStation 4 game console. We’re getting into “I’m buying an out-of-ground pool” territory here.
With Morpheus, when it launches in 2016, you’ll need:
- A PlayStation 4 game console
- A PlayStation 4 camera
- A Morpheus headset
- Space to run a wire from your PlayStation 4 to the Morpheus processing box — a separate, small unit that has onboard processing and acts as a go-between from the console to the headset
- Space to run a wire from the processing box to the headset
- (Optional) PlayStation Move controllers
Ideally, you’ll also have some space to move around, and nothing getting in the way of any wires. This is a much more serious commitment to VR, and one that’s going to pay off tremendously in terms of experience.
Project Morpheus just got an update this week at the Game Developers Conference, where Sony revealed beefed-up specs and new software demos. The experiences you’re able to have in Morpheus are far deeper than in Gear VR: I ducked and dodged bullets in The London Heist, and my colleague Joseph banged his head into the wall dodging a murderous shark.
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Not only is it a gorgeous screen, but also the PlayStation 4 is simply capable of delivering more processor-intensive experiences. The camera tracks movement in three dimensions and Move controllers approximate hands far better than anything you can use with Gear VR. Morpheus is admittedly limited by the PlayStation 4 hardware, but that’s a pretty high limit.
TIER 4: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and bleeding-edge VR
Call up the construction crew and go all in: It’s fantasy pool time. If you’re getting Oculus VR’s Rift or HTC and Valve’s Vive, get ready to dedicate a full room in your home to VR. Or maybe you’ve got a massive open area with a spare 15 x 15-foot chunk?
Wherever that space is, get ready to outfit it with a bleeding-edge PC. It’s not required, but why bother going this far and not all the way? The trade-off here is that every single time you use it, you’re going to be transported.
What Oculus and Valve are promising is the future of the medium: presence. I spent five minutes this week walking around and painting in three dimensions, with a virtual palette in one hand and a magical paintbrush in the other. It was an unbelievable experience, like nothing I’ve ever done before. I could have the same experience on the previously discussed VR solutions, but none would compare in depth.
Valve’s tracking solution — Lighthouse — enables an incredible ability to interact with the virtual world. While wearing HTC’s Vive, I was able to carefully articulate strokes in between a flower’s petals. It felt real. It was eerie.
For me, that is “presence.” The sense that I am actually somewhere else, not just allowing my brain to be tricked into believing I’m somewhere else. So I’m all in. I’m getting the in-ground pool. How serious are you about virtual reality?
Don’t miss out on all the latest from GDC 2015! Follow along at our events page right here.
[Image credit: Mediacolors/Alamy (stock lead image)
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Wearables, Software, HD, Mobile, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Google, Facebook
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