Samsung Electronics Co has rebooted its premium Galaxy smartphone series with the S6 and S6 Edge — using a three-sided screen — as the company tries to reverse profit declines and market-share losses to Apple Inc.
The devices unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday include payment software that makes them compatible with about 90 percent of card readers.
The handsets, which have metal bodies and a fingerprint reader, are set to go on sale in 20 nations starting on April 10.
Photo: Bloomberg
Samsung is trying to regain competitiveness after Apple in September last year released iPhones with bigger displays, a market segment pioneered by Galaxy S models.
The premium Edge model has a screen that extends onto the right and left sides of the smartphone, adding real estate to access applications and enabling a feature that causes the handset to glow along the edges to alert a user to calls or texts even when placed face down.
“We codenamed the project ‘Zero,’ and what we meant by this was to get back to the fundamentals,” Samsung marketing vice president David Kang said in an interview. “Everyone from design, marketing and engineering took a step back.”
Samsung shares rose 4.9 percent to 1.423 million won, the highest since June 10, in Seoul trading yesterday. The benchmark KOSPI gained 0.6 percent.
The S6 models are set to go on sale worldwide, including China, where consumers wanting bigger devices that perform the roles of smartphone and tablet computer are now buying iPhones. That momentum helped propel Apple into a global tie with Samsung in the fourth quarter and helped contribute to a third straight decline in Samsung’s quarterly earnings.
The S6 devices have a 5.1-inch front screen, the same size as the S5. They run on Samsung’s own 64-bit chips, which are based on ARM Holdings PLC’s architecture, and operate Google Inc’s Android Lollipop software. The S6 has a 16-megapixel camera with a “bright” lens that improves night photographs.
Both smartphones are to be available in gold, white and black. The S6 also comes in blue and the S6 Edge in green.
The devices have high-speed and wireless charging capabilities.
Users get enough power from 10 minutes of charging to watch video for two hours, Samsung said.
“If you look at the phone, it is a complete evolution,” Kang said. “Everything from the glass, the colors, the finishing, metal; it is a total new direction we are taking.”
Samsung Pay is to be available starting in the third quarter in the US and South Korea before being rolled out globally. Samsung has partnered with MasterCard Inc and Visa Inc and is in talks with others, including American Express Co, Citigroup Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Samsung bought LoopPay Inc last month to help it develop technology for mobile payments. LoopPay makes it easier for retailers to accept payments via smartphones.
“Samsung will need to bundle more content, software, and services to truly differentiate in the high-end smartphone segment,” Forrester Research Inc vice president Thomas Husson said in an e-mail. “What matters is not whether the S6 has a curved screen or not, but what types of new services and partnerships Samsung will announce around the device.”
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