Samsung will be launching its latest flagship smartphone in February. Samsung sent out invitations on Tuesday for “Samsung unPacked 5″ event on February 24 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The launch has been brought forward by around three weeks after sales of Samsung’s S4 came in weaker than expected, analysts said.
Samsung has high hopes for the S5. This after quarterly sales figures showed that from the 86 million smartphones Samsung sold, only 16 million was for it’s flagship Galaxy S4. Further reports claim that Samsung hopes that this Galaxy S5 model will account for a much larger portion of sales than last year’s Galaxy S4 Active did. The Galaxy S4 Active reportedly made up only three to four percent of sales. Samsung evidently wants this new Galaxy S5 Active to account for 20% or 30% of sales instead.
Samsung has shipped (not sold) 40 million units of its flagship Android handset in the six months since its global debut. While this sounds like pretty good news for Samsung, the firm apparently isn’t pleased with these numbers so far, with reports claiming that the phone maker hoped to have reached 50 million sales by now. Investors reportedly haven’t been pleased with the sales figures either, claiming that Galaxy S4 sales have been “15-20 percent lower” than had been expected. This apparently caused the firm to scale back production of the handset.
It does seem that momentum for the Galaxy S4 has been slowing. Following the smartphone’s release in May. It’s likely that the launch of Apple’s flagship iPhone 5S has contributed to this slowdown.
Nevertheless, the new Galaxy S5 is heading our way, and rumors point to a big time upgrade complete with a 5.2-inch QHD display, next-gen processor, 16MP camera, Android 4.4 KitKat, some major software changes, and a design that could be made out of plastic, metal, or perhaps both. A bigger screen is also widely expected. One thing that will apparently not be on board the new Samsung Galaxy S5 is a water-resistant and dust resistant design. Instead, according to Korean publication ETNews, the company will once again release a Samsung Galaxy S Active to replace the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active that is already on shelves.
