Well, of course it will, considering that Samsung is basically the only global phone maker brand unleashing a flagship device at the upcoming annual Mobile World Congress event (which is scheduled to kick off on February 26th and last until March 1st at the beautiful city of Barcelona in Spain).
So what exactly are the other phone brands doing at this time of the year? Apple usually does its unveilings during the second half of any given year (presumably, to build up some momentum leading into the busy holiday shopping season -- usually the most sales heavy time of the year for the iPhone maker). Fellow South Korean phone maker LG has deliberately decided to change its smartphone release strategy and schedule this year, and the talk is that its next flagship will not be making its debut until June later this year. As for other big names like Huawei and HTC, they have decided not to schedule their flagship announcements right around the time MWC 2018 is held.
So yeah -- Samsung practically has MWC all to itself. Its Galaxy S9 is expected to be formally announced a few days from now, and there is no shortage of rumors and leaks surrounding the follow up to last year’s Galaxy S8 models. Among the most notable of them is that the Galaxy S9 will come with cool midnight black, coral blue, and lilac purple color options, advanced iris scanning technology, support for animoji-ish 3D emoji, twin rear side cameras (for the bigger Galaxy S9 Plus model), ultra slow motion video recording, 3,000 mAh and 3,500 mAh batteries, top and bottom stereo speakers courtesy of AKG, Qualcomm’s mighty Snapdragon 845 chip, and Google’s Android 8.0 Oreo mobile operating system.
After the disaster of its Galaxy Note 7 back in 2016, Samsung has managed to bounce back impressively, and the momentum generated from the success of last year’s Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 flagships is still there, and the biggest smartphone vendor in the planet is taking full advantage of the world’s largest tech show for mobile technology to keep its winning streak going.
Meanwhile in other related news, Samsung’s screen manufacturing business is reportedly reducing the volume of organic light emitting diode (OLED) panels it is producing, as reported by the Nikkei Asian Review. And it has something to do with the relatively low unit sales of one of Apple’s flagship offerings last year, the iPhone X.
Nearly three weeks ago, Apple did report a slight decrease in iPhone unit sales (1 percent) during the fourth quarter of 2017, as compared to Q4 2016’s numbers. With the iPhone X’s high pricing (starting price of $999), the dip in unit sales should not be that surprising -- but because of that same high pricing and good enough demand, Apple still managed to register stellar profit numbers.
