Android Circuit: Galaxy Note 5 Launch Date, Sony Xperia Lives, Galaxy S6 Damages Samsung's Profits

Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit includes Samsung’s falling profits and revenue, news on the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 launch dates, Sony Xperia’s smartphone future, the next developer preview of Android M, details on the court case against Samsung and Oppo over bloatware, Cyanogen’s ongoing plans to conquer Android, the Material Design framework for web developers, Instagram’s latest update increases picture quality, and Disney’s new Star Wars app.

Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here).

Samsung’s Profit Still Falling

The conflict in Samsung’s own portfolio with the launch of two flagships in the form of the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge has had a knock-on effect to its finances (beyond the debates on whether the vanilla S6 or the edgier curved screen model is the better purchase). Guidance for Q2 2015 shows Samsung’s profits and revenue are still falling.

Samsung says it probably miss forecasts for the second quarter, with operating profit from April to June likely to slide 4% on an annual basis to 6.9 trillion won ($6.13 billion). Analysts had forecast earnings at 7.2 trillion won ($6.35 billion).

That will mark the second-consecutive quarterly profit decline for Samsung on an annual basis, at a time when the company is struggling to revitalize its product portfolio while Apple takes a bigger bite of the market on the high end and low-cost players like Xiaomi and India’s Micromax sell more phones on the lower end.

Samsung is, once more, following the same strategy playbook that it has used in previous years, and once more it is delivering weaker results than the previous year. The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge could have stopped this habit, but the South Korean company is running through the same steps as last year and hoping for a different result.

Samsung finds itself in a similar position to 2014, with an underwhelming and under-performing flagship. It has a mobile division that is dragging the rest of the company down with its poor performance. While I will happily give credit to the team who designed the curved screen technology seen in the S6 Edge, the lack of follow-through has weakened the final product.

Samsung needed to break out of the cycle it found itself in after the success of the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4. Last year it carried on, and the Galaxy S5 saw profits and revenue crash. The design changes from the S5 to the S6 are welcome, but they reduce the functionality of the product. Leading with two flagship handsets has unsettled the market. And continuing the policy of creating multiple variants of the flagship to release in the months that follow (some with better thought out features and higher specifications) is a tired strategy that has proven to be less effective each year it has been used.

Galaxy Note 5 Brought Forward

Last month, Samsung said that the Galaxy Note 5 handset and the Samsung Pay technology would be launching at Berlin’s IFA event in September – the traditional launch period for Samsung’s phablet handset. That might be set to change, reports Jonathan Cheng for the Wall Street Journal.

In a break with recent tradition, Samsung Electronics Co. will move up the autumn launch of its oversize smartphone lineup by several weeks to mid-August, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The South Korean company’s move is part of a bid to give its Galaxy Note smartphone-tablet hybrids some breathing room before mid-September, when Apple Inc. typically unveils its refreshed iPhone—a product whose popularity has the potential to monopolize media and consumer attention for weeks.

Samsung pulled the same trick last year with the early release of the Galaxy Alpha, debuting that handset on August 13 to get the jump on the iPhone 6. The Note 5 is going to draw direct comparisons with the iPhone 6S Plus so this will give it more coverage online. With Samsung needing as much positive publicity as possible to promote the device, this is a smart short-term move.

Sony’s Smartphone Dream Not Over

The head of Sony’s mobile division Hiroki Totoki has emphasised Sony’s commitment to its mobile division with a clear quote given to Arabian Business:

…we will never ever sell or exit from the current mobile business.

This stands in contrast to evidence that Sony would be more than happy to see the smartphone division be purchased by another company, or even shuttered by Sony itself:

It also means dealing with comments from Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai that he would not rule out considering an exit strategy for the smartphone division, “[Sony] would no longer pursue sales growth in areas such as smartphones…“, and the various rounds of layoffs that continued recently with the loss of 1000 R&D jobs.

Totoki needs to clearly communicate Sony’s ongoing mobile strategy to negate these previous points and bring back some consumer confidence to the Japanese company.

Original News:http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/07/10/android-news-digest-galaxy-note-5-samsung-galaxy-s6-profit-google-bloatware/