Samsung fans want a thriller. In a new PCMag poll, 44 percent of respondents said they think Samsung will deliver a foldable phone at its Oct. 11 event. They'll almost certainly be disappointed.
Samsung is working on a foldable phone; mobile head DJ Koh told me it was working on it as far back as early 2017. Koh said earlier this month that the phone will come out this year, and the most recent rumors have the supposed Galaxy X being first demoed at Samsung's developer conference on Nov. 7.
Among the 2,500 people polled by PCMag, 34 percent think we'll see the Galaxy S10 next week, but that's almost certainly not coming out at least until CES in January. The profound desire for the S10 speaks to a widespread vague disappointment with the Galaxy S9, which was considered to be an incremental upgrade to the S8—a good phone, certainly, but once again, not thrilling. Sales have been a bit weak.
But that's just the case with cell phones in 2018. This isn't a terribly thrilling year. Behind the scenes, everyone's going nuts working on 5G. We've seen occasional innovations like in-display fingerprint sensors, pop-up cameras, and multi-camera arrays, but except for the latter, none of those features have broken through to the mainstream.
So what's up with this Oct. 11 event? I've been following Samsung for more than a decade, and this event was rolled out in a way that makes it unlikely to be a major global launch. It was pushed out through a webpage, there will be no satellite press events or launch parties in different regions of the world, and it's at a W Hotel in Malaysia. All of those aspects say that it's a regional, not a global launch.
Here in the US, we don't see the sort of competitive ferment that's going on in the Asian midrange mobile phone market. In that market, which involves billions of people and where the $350-$600 price points are super hot, Samsung is getting absolutely hammered by Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, and other Chinese players delivering hotter phones for lower prices. For instance, in India, Samsung is in a tight battle with Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo to lead the market, according to stats from Counterpoint Research.
One of the trends going on in Asia (and indeed, here in the US) is a crazy proliferation of phone cameras. This sort of started with the Huawei P20 Pro's three rear cameras. The LG V40, coming up on Oct. 3, also has three rear cameras. There's a kind of comical Nokia quasi-leak going around the internet with five cameras.
Oct. 11, in my mind, is about Samsung trying to regain some role in the Asian midrange conversation. That isn't about a $1,000 folding phone—it's about a $580 phone with a lot of cameras on the back, most likely the quad-camera Galaxy A9 Star Pro.
"I think Samsung is going to focus on keeping Huawei in check. They have got to stop that," BayStreet Research founding partner Cliff Maldonado told me this week.
That Nov. 7 event, on the other hand, will be in San Francisco. The US is not a $580 phone market—it's now a $1,000 phone market, homeland of the excessively maximal iPhone XS Max, and a more likely place to unveil a super-high-end, cutting edge, folding smartphone.
It just shows that people surveyed on the internet can't always get what they want. If they wait a few weeks, though, they might just get what they think they need.