The signs of saturation

As Samsung wrapped up its Galaxy S IV launch party, it looked like there was only one thing that the South Korean company needed urgently. A copy of Bhagavad Gita. Particularly the part where Sri Krishna says, “Expectation is the mother of all mess-ups”. Ask any Indian film maker. If you cut a good trailer, if you do aggressive marketing and if you increase the expectations on the film, it will flop even if it is good, because you did not reach expectations. The second lesson Samsung could have learnt was from any Indian political party. When you are in opposition, it is easy to make fun of the government. When you find yourself in the government, you will find out that there is only so much you can do. You can make fun of the competition for incremental phone releases. When the time comes to launch your own phone that the roosters come home to hatch.

Of course, this is not to say that the Galaxy S IV will not sell. In an age when Golmaal becomes Bol Bachchan and still makes a ton of money, it will sell millions. It can even overtake the iPhone and could even become the largest selling phone in the world. But the new superphone tells us some things about the phone industry in general, and Samsung in particular. It tells us that the smartphone as we know it can be at a saturation point. After all, there is only so much design you can put into a rectangle slab without hitting a road block. And there is only so much innovation you can bring in hardware wise. And more importantly, with successive launches of iPhones and Galaxies, and the competition between them, the general phone buying public has come to expect miracles from the companies, not realising that there is a saturation point.

The Galaxy S IV is the most important phone for Samsung. For a company trying to be everything for everyone, the S IV was supposed to give it the global smartphone market crown. But to make up for the lack of innovation on the hardware front and the cheap looking plasticky body, Samsung packed the phone with technologies that many users would find hard just to find, let alone use. Some of the flagship features like Smart Pause that pauses your videos when you look away and Air View that will show you previews of your files if you just hover your finger in the air look good on paper. But it is when you think of real world usage cases that you understand that they are nothing but gimmicks. As Benedict Evans, an influential tech blogger, put it, “A lot of features in the S4 remind me of the endless proliferation of unused gimmicks in Japanese featurephones five years ago”. Some of the features that do look interesting seem to have been ‘inspired’ by features from phones made by companies like Nokia.

The S IV could also be a sign of things to come when Samsung and Google cease to be the best buddies they are now. Having failed to once mention Google or Android in its presentation, Samsung also introduced features like S-Voice and S-translate that seem to be competing with services offered by Google itself. If anything, the S IV could be a sign that finally Samsung wants to strike it on its own. Finally, the phone launch will itself get a place in tech history as the cheapest, cheesiest, sexist, offensive, B-grade Broadwayesque production that was ever used to launch a phone.

The author is a tech geek.

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