SEOUL: Samsung has unveiled two new Android smartphones with jumbo screens as it seeks to recapture some of the sales lost to Apple after larger iPhones came out last year.
Samsung said that the new Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge Plus will start shipping Aug. 21. Usually, Note phones don’t come out until well after Apple’s new iPhone models in September.
The timing reflects a changing smartphone landscape. IDC analyst Ramon Llamas said Samsung needed to beat Apple to the punch, or risk seeing its products drowned out by all the attention on the iPhone.
The new phones from Samsung have screens measuring 5.7 inches diagonally, the same as last year’s Note 4, yet both are lighter and thinner. They are comparable to Apple’s 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, the larger of the two new iPhones. Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge phones, which are closer in size to the regular iPhone 6, came out in April.
Samsung Electronics Co. also said its Samsung Pay mobile payment service will debut in its home country of South Korea this month. Testing in the U.S. will begin then, with a formal launch in September.
Although there’s competition from Apple Pay and Google’s upcoming Android Pay, Samsung is hoping its payments system will catch on with the inclusion of a technology that mimics the old-school, magnetic signals from credit-card swipes. That allows it to work with a wider range of merchants.
The new phones announced Thursday seek to play to Samsung’s strengths.
GALAXY NOTE 5
Though it appeals to a niche audience, the Note is popular for including a stylus to take notes and annotate images on the screen. The update provides quicker access to apps and features that use the stylus. A clicking mechanism makes the stylus easier to pull out.
One new feature ends the need to print out and rescan electronic forms to sign or fill out. Just write on the PDF document directly before saving and sending.
Screenshots can get annoying when you’re just snapping what’s visible on the screen. An article you’re trying to save might take four or five shots. A new feature called scroll capture combines all those shots into one image, though you still need to snap them one section at a time.
GALAXY S6 EDGE PLUS
The screens on Samsung’s Edge phones are curved on both sides. This spring’s S6 Edge used one of those sides for quick access to friends and other frequent contacts. Now, you can use it for quick access to favorite apps, too.
There won’t be a stylus, though, as last year’s Note Edge phone had.
COMMON TO BOTH PHONES
The new phones incorporate the improved camera technology found in this spring’s S6 phones. Added is live streaming of video you’re capturing, a practice made popular by Market and Twitter’s Periscope apps. The front cameras take sharper selfies, at 5 megapixels rather than 3.7.
The new phones also borrow design elements from the S6. They sport aluminum frames and glass backs rather than plastic. The back of the Note 5 is slightly curved for a better grip, while the Edge gets its curve on the front. Either way, it doesn’t feel as boxy as the regular S6.
Borrowing another page from Apple’s playbook, the phones are coming out just a week after they are announced. It used to take Samsung a month or longer.
