Patrick Moorhead Contributor
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Samsung Galaxy S6: Questions That Need To Be Answered Before Considering
I attended the Samsung Electronics product launch event in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress (MWC). It was a huge launch, intended to win the global audience over with the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge. Samsung had a lot riding on a successful launch as they have lost significant market share to the Apple AAPL +0.17% iPhone and want to get it back. All in all, the event was good, but generated a lot of questions for me that Samsung wasn’t ready to answer yet. I want to go over those questions.
Build quantity
The Samsung Galaxy S6 line brings with it a lot of new things, and whenever you inject new items, you add risk. The S6 has two new industrial designs, two new displays, a new Samsung Exynos 14nm SoC, new ISP, new fast charging, wireless charging and battery design, and new LoopPay radio. These are just the things that we know. As soon as the phone is out, people like Teardown.com will rip it apart and know for sure. In my opinion, the riskiest part is the new 14nm FinFET SoC. 14nm FinFET is as exotic as it gets and it took Intel INTC -1.57% a full year after production starts to get it right. A 14nm LP process is even harder.
(Credit: Patrick Moorhead at MWC 2015)
Price
I have watched nearly 500 product launches over the last 25 years. The clear majority of those launches indicated a price. Typically, only those announcements on architecture or a technology don’t have a price. There are a few reasons why Samsung might not want to communicate a price. One may be that they don’t know how many they can actually build given what I explain above with all the new variables. Samsung are master executors, but the last thing they want to do is have a gap between being able to ship truckloads of the new stuff and have the old stuff available. To mitigate that, you only give the price when you know. And they don’t know. It could also be a change in pricing strategy, let’s say, to give less dollars to the carriers and shifting those dollars to direct, consumer marketing.
Tested performance
Samsung Electronics made a lot of performance claims on the S6. They talked about performance of the SoC, battery life and charging, camera, and energy efficiency, among others. I take the claims made at the event with a grain of salt and will wait for reviewers I trust to run good, application-based benchmarks or those synthetic ones that mirror applications. I am especially interested in the performance of the new Exynos SoC to see what they got out of their 14nm process and their transistors. Exynos tested performance has really been hit or miss over the past five years so you can’t assume the 7000 series is great. Did Samsung get lower power or any better performance or were they forced to lower frequency to improve yield? I’m interested in their modem and how well it performs in the new chassis. I reported on Samsung LTE modem performance tests versus Qualcomm on an older Samsung LTE phone which showed it performed 20% slower and had 5-12% more power draw than Qualcomm, so I’d like to see how this one does.
