Galaxy Fold Impresses as Samsung Looks to Maintain Lead in Competitive Field
Whether the breadth of this week's Samsung smartphone launches was enough to fend off Huawei’s aggressive drive to become the global smartphone leader is the big unknown coming out of the high-profile Samsung Unpacked event in San Francisco, wrote IHS analyst Wayne Lam in post-event commentary Wednesday. Lam referred to the “new design language” of the S10, S10+ and S10e, along with the Galaxy Fold and the S10 5G model, and their simplified One UI software.
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Samsung faces stiff competition from Apple and an “increasingly competitive field of Chinese manufacturers” that has shrunk its market share in China to single digits, said Lam, who has cited the need for the world’s leading smartphone vendor to “out-innovate itself.” Samsung maintained its global lead in smartphone shipments in Q4 at 19 percent share, virtually unchanged year on year, though shipments declined nearly 6 percent from Q4 a year earlier to 70.2 million units, IHS said. Huawei leapfrogged Apple to take second place, jumping to 15 percent share on a 48 percent rise in shipments.
With many in the industry looking to foldable phones as the market savior, Strategy Analytics sees Samsung as the standard-setter for the category. Analyst Neil Mawston referred to three stats about foldable phones in a Wednesday tweet, saying global foldable phone revenues will shoot from zero last year to $2 billion this year, despite representing less than 1 percent of global shipments. Samsung’s $1,980 “ultra-premium” Fold comes in at the high end of the product range of the first wave of foldables, which Mawston said will range $500-$2,000.
Strategy Analytics’ Ville-Petteri Ukonaho said Samsung’s Fold sets a new benchmark for foldable phones on design and functionality, calling Royole’s device introduced in October “a poor prototype” by comparison. Samsung’s “unparalleled” device with its inside 7.3-inch display and 4.6-inch cover display and art hinge system "that keeps dirt out” is the one to beat, “so far,” he said. The feature eliciting one of the biggest responses from the audience at the Wednesday event is App Continuity, which Google added to the Android platform, said Ukonaho. Applications running on the cover display will seamlessly transition to the main display and expand to reveal more content. Not a Samsung exclusive, App Continuity likely will make its way to other foldables in the future, he said.
Representing the beginning of Samsung’s foldable timeline, the Galaxy Fold is an “aspirational luxury” product, Lam emailed us, noting the first generation of any new technology is very expensive. Each successive iteration “should move the foldable form factor into the mainstream.” Lam wouldn’t guess at how many Folds Samsung will sell this year -- “not much compared to the S10’s... but I will say that they will sell nearly every unit they manufacture.”
Lam’s biggest concern about the foldable design is the user interface, he said. “Google has done some work in this area but this form factor may need to have a re-think of the user experience,” currently limited by Android, which Lam said is designed "for phones rather than tablets.”
On highlights from Samsung’s Wednesday news, Lam cited the in-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor on the S10 and S10+, an industry first, and the Infinity-O display with “complexities beyond its hole-punched camera.” Other sensors, such as for ambient light and proximity, are also embedded behind the OLED display pixels. The in-display fingerprint sensor is a trend in the important China market, which sells triple the number of smartphones as the U.S. every year: “Any global phone maker would not be doing their job if they weren’t intently studying the design trends in that market,” Lam said. Samsung’s choice of the Qualcomm ultrasonic solution will improve the false-positive performance of existing optical solutions, he said: “Samsung is trying to do one better with ultrasonic technology.”
Elsewhere, Dougherty & Co. analyst Steven Frankel noted the trio of new Samsung S10 phones includes Dolby Atmos, after including the technology in the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus following “a multi-year absence.” He observed that “not surprisingly, the S10 supports HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision.”
Samsung began preorders for the three S10 models at the top five U.S. wireless carriers Thursday, sweetening the offer for the S10 ($899) and S10+ ($999) models with free Galaxy Buds, a $139 value, through March 7. Carriers are also offering varying versions of a buy-one-get-one-free offer for the $749 S10e, seen by analysts as a counterpart to Apple’s iPhone XR.