Samsung's Galaxy S series remains, in spite of the successes of the Galaxy Note in recent years, the company's flagship range, and although the likes of the HTC One have shown a great deal of promise this year, it is still comfortably the boss of the high-end Android market. Now, we're hearing reports of what some are already touting to be the Galaxy S5 specs, and it's fair to say, if the revelations carry any weight, that the next big thing out of South Korea will be the beastliest yet.
Samsung has today announced the availability of its new GamePad controller in select European markets. The Samsung GamePad is a second-generation product that offers an entirely new design, stepping away from its Xbox controller inspired design roots and bringing a fresh new look to the table.
This year, around July, it emerged that Apple could be introducing a gold, or "champagne" color configuration of its forthcoming smartphone, which we now know to be called the iPhone 5s. At the time, commentators didn't really know what to make of it, but the response, coupled with the lack of availability of the gold model due to huge sales, spoke for them. Samsung already had a stab at bringing out a gold Galaxy S4 (although this was not, the company maintains, a shameless copycat effort), but now, the South Korean outfit has gone one better by taking the wraps off the - drums please - Galaxy S4 Crystal Edition.
Samsung's Galaxy S4 may be the flagship smartphone, but the Galaxy Note 3 appears to be creeping up on its smaller cousin. The larger of the two major Samsung handsets has just passed the 10 million sales mark in 60 days, and considering the S4 took 50 days to achieve this feat, the Korean company's phablet revolution is getting stronger with each new release.
Early benchmark results are often a good way of discovering whether a new device is being tested out, and with talk currently rife regarding Samsung's next batch of flagship smartphones, benchmarks found over at GFXBench could already show the full list of specs of the Galaxy S5. The S4 only arrived in the late spring, but with sales having not reached expectations, the Korean company is said to be working doubly hard on its eventual successor. According to the GFXBench results, the device will boast the latest and greatest Android 4.4 KitKat, a Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.5 GHz as well as a potentially jaw-dropping 2560 x 1440 resolution, or 2K HD display.
Famous faces make for great advertisement fodder when the right celebrity is used to promote a product, and with Samsung's strange, enigmatic promotion of Galaxy devices through a lengthy football (soccer)-themed campaign, picking a star like the legendary German forward Franz Beckenbauer to be head coach of the so-called 'Galaxy 11' seemed an informed decision.
Samsung already has a reputation for launching smartphones in a variety of different colors, and it's certainly not shy about milking its handsets for all its worth be re-launching them with new paint jobs after their initial release. That's why we're not surprised in the least to see Samsung's Argentinian arm announce two new colors for the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone.
Samsung's flagship line of Galaxy S phones is getting closer and closer to churning out its fifth iteration, and as would be expected of any huge product launch that's months away, we're already starting to see details leak out of what the Galaxy S5 may feature. We say 'may' simply because at this point, anything could change. With the product not expected to enter mass production for at least another couple of months, we wouldn't want to put our houses on anything staying the way the rumors have things at the moment. That said, on to the rumors!
Suspicion, speculation and good old fashioned controversy is never far away in the smartphone industry. Companies like Samsung, HTC and Apple are always keen to let the public know how well their hardware performs in areas that matter most to the consumer. One of the accepted methods of documenting and listing that performance is by running the hardware through a well-known benchmarking text. Futuremark - the Finnish development team behind 3DMark for Android - has announced that it suspects Samsung and HTC of cheating the benchmark tests to produce favorable results, and as such has delisted the offending handsets.
If you like your news to be of the anecdotal variety then you're in for a treat, because that's exactly what we've got. If you're also a bit keen on the iPhone 5c, then you might want to sit down, because this one's going make you weak at the knees. According to, yes, anecdotal reports in India, Apple's somewhat underwhelming iPhone 5c might be outselling the Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4 device.
