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According to a report recently published by blog TMoNews this week, Samsung’s latest flagship offering -- the Galaxy S8 -- could arrive a couple of days earlier than its scheduled launch date (which is this coming April 21st) for subscribers of T-Mobile who preordered the device. The third biggest wireless carrier in the United States has apparently started sending text messages to customers, notifying them that the newest Galaxy handsets will be shipping on April 19th.
To be perfectly clear about it, T-Mobile has not confirmed if indeed it has plans to ship the Galaxy S8 sooner than expected. Still, it bears noting that the major mobile operator has actually done something like this before. If anything else, this ploy is pretty consistent with T-Mobile’s image as sort of the aggressive one among the Big Four (which includes Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint).
As for Samsung, the South Korean phone maker will probably not mind the change in schedule. On the wake of the disastrous release of its Galaxy Note 7 phablet last year, the company needs a hit now more than ever, and its Galaxy S8 model is set to help Samsung get back to being the biggest smartphone vendor in the world.
Things are not perfect though -- very recently, it was reported that Samsung’s new virtual assistant, Bixby, will not be made available on Galaxy S8 devices after all at launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal. It turns out that the English language edition of Bixby is still not ready. Samsung has promised that the AI driven assistant will be rolled out some time in spring of this year. Interestingly, the Korean language version of Bixby, on the other hand, will be ready by April 21st.
Having the advantage of being preloaded on Galaxy S8 devices, Bixby is seen by various industry watchers as something that might give Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa a run for their money. It is not clear yet how the delayed deployment of the English language version of Bixby will affect things, but many will agree that with lesser setbacks now, the better it will be for Samsung in the road ahead.
Bixby issues notwithstanding, Samsung has some reason to celebrate -- according to projections made by TrendForce, the South Korean mobile manufacturer has claimed a 26.1 percent share of all smartphone sales during the first three months of this year. That represents an improvement over the 18.5 percent share it managed during the same period the previous year. More importantly, Samsung has helped shrunk the share of its fierce rival Apple from 20.3 percent a year ago to 16.9 percent in 2017.
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