Samsung takes on Apple with S6 phones

NEW YORK — Samsung, locked in a tight race with Apple to be the world’s biggest smartphone maker, has unveiled its latest premium Galaxy S smartphones featuring a slim body made from aircraft-grade metal.

Designed from scratch in an operation dubbed Project Zero, the Galaxy S6 and its three-sided curved screen variant are critical to Samsung’s plans to reverse plunging smartphone revenues that led to its first annual earnings fall in three years last year.

A warm initial reception sent its shares soaring 4.9 per cent at the close of trade in Korea yesterday. Some technology publications described the phones as Samsung’s best-looking to date after its previous flagship device, the Galaxy S5, failed to impress.

“We listen to our customers and we learn from our missteps,” Mr J K Shin, Samsung’s mobile chief, told a packed hall in Barcelona ahead of the annual Mobile World Congress trade show, where the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge were unveiled on Sunday.

Samsung and Apple have gone back and forth as the world’s top smartphone maker in recent years. Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, released last year, have helped it catch up. Both of these new phones were designed to be larger than previous versions and their size was heavily marketed, in part to appeal to customers who liked Samsung’s large phones.

Samsung begins its fight-back on April 10 when the revamped Galaxy phones go on sale in 20 countries in one of the most important product launches in the firm’s history. It is unknown if Singapore is among the countries.

The company said its new design took years to develop. As phones got thinner, it inevitably ended up “with a device that’s very cold and very industrial”, said Mr Hong Yeo, a senior designer. The Project Zero team “was given the freedom to design our dream device”, he said.

Stand-out features include a casing made from lightweight metal used in airplanes, a step up from the plastic that disappointed many critics of the S5, and Corning’s Gorilla Glass on both the front and back.

The premium Edge model has a screen that extends to the right and left sides of the phone, adding real estate to access applications and enabling a feature that causes the phone to glow along the edges to alert a user to calls or texts even when placed face down.

In addition to camera and screen upgrades, Samsung stripped out many of its unpopular in-house apps that infuriated users by gobbling up memory.

In another departure, batteries in the new phones cannot be replaced. To compensate, the devices are the first from Samsung to support wireless charging without a dedicated accessory and can also get four hours of power with a 10-minute charge by cord.

Samsung is also touting the Galaxy S6’s compatibility with a mobile payment system it is preparing to launch in the United States and South Korea in the second half of this year. Agencies