Rating: Never mind the processor speed and the screen size
Tomorrow [May 29th 2012], is the official release date for the Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone in Europe and ten other cities worldwide including Tokyo and Dubai. There have already been glowing revues and the general consensus is that this is the handset which will really take the battle to Apple and its iconic iPhone range. Many pundits seem to overlook the fact that Samsung has already stolen the mantle of the leading vendor of mobile phones from Nokia. So why shouldn’t the Galaxy S3 trounce the iPhone because Samsung obviously knows what it is doing in the mobile phone business. Making phones that people actually want helps a lot. However, GoMobile News is with Fred Huet, founder of Greenwich Consulting, who points out that mobile payments is Apple’s Achilles heel.As Huet says, “Mobile payments are set to become a key differentiator in the ongoing handset war.” Too right.
So what has Samsung done? Only linked up with Visa to make the S3 the official phone of the Olympics showcasing Visa’s mobile payment application, Visa payWave. That’s all.
“Apple has yet to make any firm statements about its mobile payments strategy with the iPhone – it has not typically put much effort into partnering,” Huet observes.
He adds, “Regardless of Apple’s strategy – be it to build mobile payments functionality itself or partner – Samsung has been wise to get a head start in this market and set out its stall early.”
What Huet forgets to mention is that the fact that NFC is built into the Galaxy S3 and Apple failed dismally to build it into its latest offering – the 4S.
It’s no good speculating that the next iPhone (hopefully to be called the iPhone 5 and not the iPhone 4Z) might actually boast an NFC capability. Apple missed that boat.
And so has Nokia. It has already launched a range of NFC enabled handsets. The snag is that none of them run the Windows Phone 7 (W7 Mango) OS to which it has nailed its future in the smartphone sector.
Curiously, Motorola also appears to have missed the boat because as we reported previously here, the Motorola Razr (the original model) seems to have the components to support NFC but not the software drivers.
Most of tomorrow’s speculation about the Galaxy S3 will almost certainly centre on its screen size and processor capability (speed).
But here at GoMobile News we firmly believe that its support for mobile payments is key.
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Poorly informed author fails to mention that the Sony Xperia-S has NFC and has been in the market for 3+ months. What’s ‘new’ about this feature of the (yet to be launched) new Galaxy? Sponsoring the Olympics is a noble marketing expense bit is not a product feature and hardly a technology breakthrough.
Otherwise it’s not a bad phone at all and kudos to Samsung for market grab – but when writing about device features, can you be a little more professional?
Um. What are you talking about – poorly informed? The first ever NFC enabled handset was a Nokia – the 6131 back in 2006. Sadly, Nokia has hinted that there will be an NFC enabled version of its Lumia 610 W7 Mango smartphone but it isn’t shipping quite yet. What has this got to do with a Sony handset? What kind of first are you hinting at?