Samsung brought a touchscreen phone with a slide-out keyboard to Barcelona this month, six weeks after Apple announced one without the keyboard, and the timing is doing a lot of work in how that product is being received.
To be fair to Samsung, the F700 was not designed in six weeks. Products at this stage of polish have been in development for a year or more, and touchscreen phones are not a new idea, they are an old idea that has mostly been executed badly on resistive panels with a stylus. Samsung deserves credit for arriving at a similar conclusion independently and for shipping a physical keyboard alongside it, which is a hedge Apple has refused to make.
That hedge is the interesting part. Samsung has looked at the same problem and concluded that people will not give up keys, so it has built a device that offers both and is consequently thicker, heavier and more mechanically complex than it would otherwise be. Apple has concluded that the keys are the thing preventing the screen from being the whole front of the device, and has bet the entire product on software solving what hardware used to. One of these companies is going to look extremely clever in two years.
What Samsung has that Apple does not is the rest of the range, and this is the part I think gets underrated. The Ultra Edition phones are genuinely thin, well made, sold in enormous volume, and priced across the whole market rather than at one aspirational point. Samsung ships phones at every tier the way Nokia does, which is the strategy that actually wins share, and it has been closing on Motorola for a while now.
What Samsung does not have is software, and it has less of it than almost anybody. The interfaces on these devices are pleasant enough and completely undifferentiated, assembled from the same nested-list vocabulary as every other handset in this hall. There is no platform, no developer story, and no reason for anybody to build anything for a Samsung phone specifically. In a market where the device is a phone, that does not matter. In the market that may be arriving in June, it matters enormously.
The component position is the hedge that makes Samsung difficult to bet against regardless. This is a company that makes memory, makes displays, makes processors, and sells all of them to competitors. Even the phones it loses are partly its own revenue. I said much the same thing about its cameras last autumn and it holds here: Samsung’s consumer brands are the least impressive part of a formidable company.
My honest read on the F700 is that it is a good device that will sell respectably and be remembered, if at all, for having existed at the same moment as something more consequential. That is an unfair fate and it is also how these things go. Being first is worth very little. Being first with software nobody else can match is worth everything, and we do not yet know whether anybody has that.