NEW
YORK (AP) -- Samsung is taking to the Big Apple to reveal its next big
challenge to Apple: a successor to its top-selling Galaxy S III
smartphone.
The
Korean company has rented New York's Radio City Music Hall for an event
Thursday evening. The company has hinted that it will reveal the Galaxy
S IV phone. Judging by the announcement of the S III in last May, this
means the new phone will be available in stores in a month or two.
It's
not known what the new phone will look like or how it will differ from
its predecessor, but there's speculation that Samsung will once again
increase the screen size. Every successive generation of the Galaxy line
has been bigger than the one before, and the S III sports a screen that
measures 4.8 inches on the diagonal, substantially larger than the
iPhone 5's 4-inch screen.
In
the last two years, Samsung has emerged as Apple's main competitor in
the high-end smartphone market. At the same time, it has sold enough
inexpensive low-end phones to edge out Nokia Corp. as the world's
largest maker of phones.
The
Galaxy line has Samsung's chief weapon in the fight, and it has
succeeded in making it a recognizable brand while competitors like
Taiwan's HTC Corp. and Korean rival LG have stumbled. Samsung has sold
100 million Galaxy S phones since they first came out in 2010. That's
still well below the 268 million iPhones Apple has sold in the same
period, but Samsung's sales rate is catching up.
Research
firm Strategy Analytics said the Galaxy S3 overtook Apple's iPhone 4S
as the world's best-selling smartphone for the first time in the third
quarter of last year, as Apple fans were holding off for the iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 took back the crown in the fourth quarter.
Gartner
analyst Michael Gartenberg believes it won't matter what the new
Samsung phone hardware will do, because consumers have to a large extent
stopped judging phones by their screen resolution or processor power.
What really matters, he said, are the software and services the phone
offers.
"At
this point it comes down to going beyond the hardware, into the
software," he said. "Increasingly, as consumers are looking at
ecosystem, beyond just the device ... how the phone relates to the
tablet and relates back to the computer and relates to the television
set - those things become far more important over time. While Samsung
has shown a tremendous capability around devices, it remains to be seen
how effective their larger ecosystem story is."
Gartenberg
also said competition from other Android smartphones is increasing. For
instance, HTC just updated its top-line "One" phones. Unless they're
enthralled by Samsung-specific services, Galaxy users will find it easy
to switch to other Android phones, which offer the same Google services.
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2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
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