Perhaps owing to the discontinuation of sales and manufacturing of the Galaxy Note 7 following the numerous incidents where Samsung’s flagship phablet exploded or burst into flames, rumors have been making the rounds suggesting that Samsung would speed up the release of its next flagship Galaxy S8 before the Mobile World Congress in February. Well, Samsung has said that that’s not going to happen.
And early Galaxy S8 release makes no damn sense
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the last couple of months have been no picnic for Samsung with its wildly popular Galaxy Note 7 being responsible for numerous fires and even a few injuries. While the company instigated a recall to deliver “safe” phones, these proved to be just as unsafe causing the company to simply throw in the towel on the Galaxy Note 7 and move to damage control and reputation repair.
Samsung says, without over stating it, that it still doesn’t know what caused the problem with batteries exploding or catching fire, most often when charging, and to me given that this is hardly the time for the company that will lose nearly $6 billion this quarter due to the Notes arsonist tendencies to speed up the release of anything.
I’ve written in the past that part of the problem with the Galaxy Note 7 could have been its rush to market ahead of Apple’s unveiling of its new iPhones, so to rush something to market, especially its flagship smartphone the Galaxy S8 would be the acme of folly.
Yes, Samsung did tell Reuters today that it was instituting an upgrade plan in South Korea, which I wrote about this morning, for those that bought the Galaxy Note 7 that would see them receive the Galaxy S7 for half price with the understanding that they could straight up swap it for the Galaxy S8 or the Galaxy Note 8 next year. Yes, it was a bit of a shock that the company would come out this early and announce that it would release a Galaxy Note 8 next year so close to the disaster of the Note 7.
Rumored/Leaked specs for the Galaxy S8 made the rounds today
If you were trolling around Weibo today and also happen to speak Mandarin, you may have caught that an unnamed leaker was claiming to be in the know when it comes to the Galaxy S8.
The post claimed that Samsung was planning a 5.5-inch 4K Super AMOLED display, which would be capable of offering 3840 x 2160 resolution and 506 PPI pixel density and that Samsung would be doing away with its home button.
Additionally, the post said that the S8 Galaxy would be powered by an Exynos 8895 chip or Qualcomm Snapdragon 830. This authority wouldn’t say if the S8 had 6GBs of RAM or 8GBs.
Perhaps owing to this Weibo post the Internet was set alight (ok, sorry Samsung) with suggestions that an early release was forthcoming.
Samsung unveils its Galaxy line of smartphones, without fail, at the Mobile World Congress and ships them the next month and that’s not going to change according to Samsung.
“Currently we do not have any plans to release Galaxy S8 early.” said a high-ranking official for Samsung Electronics to the Korean site The Electronic Times. “Even before we released Galaxy Note 7, we had a separate plan to announce Galaxy S8, continued the unnamed official before saying, “Pushing release date forward all of sudden is something that is realistically impossible.”