The Next Galaxy From Samsung

Come March 1, Metals will flow, Beauty will be powerful, Borders will disappear, Reflections will be free, Colours will live, The future will be the present! Big words indeed. But wondering what this is all about? Well, Samsung's next super-smartphone of course. The Next Galaxy. The Galaxy S6. And judging by the recent teasers, the South Korean electronics conglomerate knows for sure how to drum up hype. For its future rests pretty much on the success of this one single phone. Even if it very well deserves full credit for making phablets a household name. And notwithstanding the fact that it's smartly preparing an escape route from smartphone business (hint: semiconductors).

Are you ready? Samsung definitely is!
So far all we have are the usual rumours. And now the cryptic tweets and teasers. Putting two and two together, it's perhaps safe to assume that the company has finally eschewed plastic in favour of metal, designed a phone that's better-looking, with an edge-to-edge display (or possibly curved edges) and a radically improvised screen, in addition to the usual hardware advancements like 3GB RAM, 21-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera, 2600 mAh battery and 2K display. A beast of a phone on paper, but can it actually deliver in real life?

Samsung's ascent as the king of Android smartphones happened rightfully with the Galaxy S III in 2012 (I myself bought one later that year before switching to the Galaxy S4!). Despite its questionable design and it running the bloated and much loathed TouchWiz, the phone achieved immense mainstream success, thanks to a fantastic camera and a speedy processor that allowed it to handle most of the computing tasks thrown at it without skipping a beat. 50 million Galaxy S IIIs were sold in a year, a number big enough to get it labelled as an "iPhone killer". Then somewhere down the lane, Samsung got complacent (or is arrogant the right word?).

The Galaxy S4 and S5 came and went, giving HTC, LG, Motorola and most importantly Xiaomi the attention they fittingly deserved, the bloatware became incessant in its miscalculated attempts to offer a Google-free experience, and its mobile stronghold suffered a deathblow when Apple released its bigger iPhones last year. But there is still hope! The company's recent decision to dial back on software customizations (ChatON and WatchON are already dead) and come up with fewer but better-designed phones indicates its willingness to learn a thing or two from its past mistakes and adapt to an ever-changing consumer market. The Unpacked Event set for March 1 will no doubt be keenly watched, not only in terms what phone Samsung plans to unveil, but also for what it chooses it pack it with.

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