Today in Smartphone land, the Mobile World Conference 2015 happened, and some announcements were made about some of the Flagship android phones that will be released this year. Samsung made some controversial decisions about their very popular next iteration of the Samsung Galaxy Series, the twin Samsung Galaxy S6, and the S6 Edge. Slightly under the shadow of that controversy, HTC Also announced details about their upcoming phone the HTC One M9.
According to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC), 81.5% of all active smartphones are running android. It’s debatable that among the most popular sits the Samsung Galaxy series. Given that, chances are, you know someone with one, or have one yourself. Announcing the next model in a line of products that has such a huge install base is a pretty big deal, so I can imagine if I were at the head of Samsung right now, I’d be sweating myself dry with the anxiety that it had such a critical reaction. Let’s take a look and see what we can see about it, shall we?
Well, there we are! These bad boys have a tentative April launch date, with a very similar look, at first glance, to the previous phones. What could go wrong? What could even be different? A more detailed look, first of all, will reveal that the S6 Edge follows suit to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Edge, in that the sides of the screen are curved, allowing for a secondary interface along the sides of the phone.
Samsung has their own launcher that gives you access to apps quickly using the side bar. This launcher is called TouchWiz, and looks pretty convenient. The phones also both ditch the conventional plastic shell in favour of Gorilla Glass on both sides, with a metal frame. They also made the decision to opt out of the traditional microSD or SD support and so the phone comes in three different storage models (32GB, 64GB, and 128GB), with internal storage only. The battery is also no longer replaceable.
This decision was widely upsetting to those people who chose the Samsung Galaxy series over other models as a result. For a lot of people, their decision was made based on the ability to have the expandability. Personally, I have a Nexus 5, and I’ve never missed having it, due to just setting up an ftp server on my phone in order to transfer files easily to other devices, but hey, I understand that not everyone’s as technical as that.
Let’s take a glance, however, at the HTC One M9, which was also detailed today and see why this underdog may have a fighting chance against the goliath that is S6.
HTC has always been on the outskirts as one of the lesser known Android phone supporters. They do however have a reputation for having mind blowing speakers. The One M9 will be no exception. This phone with a slightly lower resolution screen than the S6, but aside from that, it has virtually the same specs. Advantages being it has an awesome 20.7 megapixel back camera, microSD card support, and their amazing HTC Sense 7, which apparently allows for greater customization of the colour scheme of Android 5.0. I like pretty things. (Did I mention it comes in super cute pink~?)
I really like Android 5.0 and I’m not a crazy huge fan of the 6 inch screen on the Nexus 6, so until my dream phone comes out, I can only hope that these ones live up to the hype.