14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung Galaxy S5, the flagship smartphone that the South Korean mobile phone maker has made official during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in late February, might be the proof that there's actually little room for innovation in the crowded smartphone space.
We attended the handset's launch event at MWC and we had the chance to play with it for several minutes there, and we actually liked it.
Galaxy S5 looks like a high-end smartphone, feels like one when held in the hand, and most certainly performs like one. After all, this is exactly what people would like to receive as part of a new, top-of-the-line device today.
However, this does not mean that the handset that enthusiasts have been waiting for was indeed released two weeks ago. As a matter of fact, it wasn't.
I did say before that, when it came down to impressive features, Galaxy S5 fell a bit short, considering the expectations that users had related to it.
There was no 2K screen to enjoy and no 64-bit processor to offer a bit more performance capabilities than the quad-core one included inside the phone has to deliver. These were features that many enthusiasts were looking for, and they were disappointed.
Earlier reports also suggested that Galaxy S5 might land on the market with a metal body, yet this did not happen either. Samsung did announce the phone with dust- and water-resistant certification, yet the feature has been included in other high-end phones out there for quite some time now.
Overall, Galaxy S5 might be easily considered only an improved version of the Galaxy S4, which comes with better hardware and with software enhancements, but which lacks actual innovation.
As it turns out, Samsung themselves might be aware of that. A recent report coming from Business Korea suggests that the company has launched the phone earlier than expected in order to hide the lack of innovation inside it.
The info is said to come from a source in the mobile phone industry, which claims that even company employees agree upon the fact that the handset does not pack the innovation that it was expected to.
The same source is cited stating that Samsung decided to unveil the new flagship model at the MWC because it would have drawn too much attention to the phone's innovation problem if it announced it at a separate event.
In the past years, the phone maker revealed the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4 models after MWC, and it managed to impress a lot with them. Thus, it was somehow surprising that it decided to unveil this year's model sooner than expected.
According to Samsung themselves, there were various reasons behind the decision to launch the phone earlier, but they mainly had to do with the great traction that Apple's iPhone 5S has seen since made official late last year.
One way or the other, the unveiling of Galaxy S5 felt a bit rushed, and the fact that the company won't bring it to shelves before April 11 appears to confirm that. The device that it was expected to announce at the Samsung Unpacked 2014 Episode 1 event in Barcelona did not show up in the end.
Samsung Mobile Business head Shin Jong-kyun was cited saying that “The Galaxy S5 is the one that fulfills its intended function as a smartphone.”
The smartphone has received good reviews so far, due to features such as heart rate sensor on the back, support for various LTE connectivity capabilities, and the like. However, as said before, not all people out there were truly impressed with the phone.
For what it's worth, they might actually be right to see Galaxy S5 as lacking innovation, especially if they compare it with other high-end handsets out there, as well as with new devices launched in the mid-range segment.
For example, Sony's latest three flagship models were launched with dust and waterproof designs, which means that the company actually picked up the trend one year later, and there's nothing impressive about it.
Moreover, Galaxy S5 came with a 16-megapixel camera on the back, while Nokia has had smartphones with 41MP and 20MP cameras out on shelves for a long time. The Finnish vendor did not include 4K video recording with them, but other phone makers did.
Also, Samsung has been long criticized for packing only plastic cases with its Galaxy S devices, and the company did not move away from this with the new phone either. It did include a perforated back cover on the device, making it more comfortable to hold, but that might not cut it.
To be considered innovative, the new handset should have been unveiled with the features that were long rumored for it: a metal body, a 2K screen, and a more powerful processor, maybe that 64-bit octa-core that the South Korean company has been rumored to plan for it.
The one question that comes to my mind at the moment, however, is whether these hardware advancements alone would have been enough to consider Galaxy S5 an innovative product all around.
On the one hand, they might have been. On the other, however, they might have been seen only as a display of very high-end mobile technology, resulting in a high price for a product that fits in your pocket, and that is simply called “smartphone.”
In this regard, the device certainly needed equally great software features, that's for sure. Updated applications, a new version of Android, and some new functionality added to the mix aren't always enough to please enthusiasts who are always looking for more from new handsets.
If so, this is not only Samsung's problem, and other mobile phone makers out there are also facing similar issues with their latest products, and maybe even with those they are planning to bring to the market in the next months.
The smartphone segment has been expanding very fast in the past few years, ever since the iPhone and Google's Android took the lead, and it might be growing at a faster pace than what vendors are able to keep up with.
In the past few years, Apple has been mocked a lot for touting new iPhone models as being slimmer, faster, more innovative than the previous one, but missing features that Android devices were being released with.
Today, most smartphones brought to the market start resembling a lot one another: they have larger screens, faster processors, the latest software enhancements out there, and also pack larger and larger camera sensors on the back.
As it turns out, these alone are not enough to consider them innovative, especially when looking back at what some of the flagship units launched in the past few years had to offer. And Galaxy S5, in the form that it was announced at MWC, is a good example in this regard.
A premium model of the phone might become official in the coming months, packing all the very high-end features that Samsung was expected to include inside the device right from the start, but I cannot help wondering whether that will be enough.
Others might also plan similar capabilities for their handsets, or they might even include some of them in new products before Samsung does, and the race for finding innovation will begin once again. I guess we'll just have to wait for the premium Galaxy S5 to arrive to see what critics have to say about it.