Samsung S4

Galaxy S5 design needs to be different to the S4, says Samsung

Samsung didn’t reveal much that was new in a fairly wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, but exec VP of the company’s mobile division Lee Young Hee did tease a couple of things while confirming that the Galaxy S5 would be released by April.

The company is “studying the possibility” of including the iris-recognition security system we told you about last month. If Samsung succeeds, it would be a neat piece of one-upmanship on the Touch ID fingerprint scanner in Apple’s iPhone 5S, iris-recognition being both faster and more secure than fingerprints.

The company also said that it recognized that the design of the S4 wasn’t sufficiently different from the S3, and that we can expect something significantly different from the S5 … 
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Korean site ET News reports that Samsung has cut its smartphone sales target for 2014 from 360M handsets to 330M. The company’s original goal would have represented 25 percent year-on-year growth, now reduced to just 14 percent.

The company is blaming saturation at the top end of the market, with many existing owners of flagship handsets having reduced their upgrade cycle from annual to bi-annual.

Samsung as a whole isn’t hurting – it recently announced record revenues and profits – but the bulk of those earnings came from lower-end handsets and its chip manufacturing business. The ET News piece says that Samsung also plans to move into a whole bunch of new areas, including cloud computing and hi-tech materials … 
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The Samsung Galaxy S4 has retained its title as winner of the highly-regarded Which? UK consumer association battery-life tests, despite competition from newer handsets. The S4 achieved call times 37 percent greater than its nearest rival, the HTC One. The results in web use were far closer, but the Samsung S4 took the lead there too.

The Galaxy S4 also won back in June, but retained its title in the face of new competition from the latest iPhones and an updated Nokia Lumia. Android handsets took the top three slots in call times, and the top four in web use …

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