Samsung fast tracks Galaxy S7 rollout

Samsung is reported to be fast-tracking its S7 flagship phone to counter the iPhone 6s’s market advantage of 3d touch.

Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge

Samsung plans to match the iPhone 6s market advantage of 3D touch functionality with an S7 model as early as January, in what looms as a showdown on touchscreen advanced capability.

If the Galaxy S7 launches in January, as the Korea IT News site etnews.com suggests, it will come out a month ahead of when Galaxy phones typically launch, in what looks an urgent bid to address Apple’s increasing share of the smartphone market.

In Apple’s implementation, 3D touch enables an iPhone to respond to a hard press on a display by showing preview content, such as a preview of an email or text message. Take your finger off the display, and it magically returns to your email list as if nothing has happened. Press even harder, and you effectively “lock” the screen you have just been viewing.

It’s an iPhone adaptation of the Force Touch feature found on the 12-inch MacBook touchpad and Apple Watch.

It’s also a feature that helped Apple sell a phenomenal 13 million iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus units within three days of the handset’s launch last month. What makes the result especially noteworthy is that, in other respects, iPhone 6s was a modest upgrade to the previous iPhone 6, with better cameras and a faster processor, but not a revolutionary step.

The fact that Android would follow suit with a Force Touch screen capability had been obvious from the start. The week before Apple’s September 9 launch, at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, China vendor Huawei announced its own version of Force Touch on its upcoming Mate S smartphone.

At the IFA event Huawei demonstrated weighing an orange on the display to show off the Mate S’s ability to sense pressure. We’re yet to see the software capabilities around Huawei’s implementation.

Huawei’s may have been a different and rudimentary implementation of Force Touch however it showed then that Apple didn’t have a monopoly on the Force Touch phenomenon.

Go even further back, a year earlier, and Hewlett-Packard had included an early version of Force Touch on its EliteBook Folio 1040 without success. It wasn’t anything like what Apple offers with its taptic feedback engine that mimics a trackpad ‘click’, but an implementation nonetheless.

The fact that iPhone 6s wouldn’t be alone with Force Touch became even more obvious early this month when Synaptics detailed its upcoming “ClearPad ClearForce force-sense solutions” to be shipped in early 2016.

Synaptics, a company that specialises in componentry around touch, displays and biometric identification, in its pitch sought to stake its claim on Force Touch in the announcement. It said it had been involved in force technology since 1996, and had more than 60 granted and pending patents worldwide on it.

It announced features of the upcoming ClearForce solutions such as variable speed scrolling, picture zooming and panning, function preview and selection (which is what Apple offers), continuous variable gaming control functions, right-side mouse click behaviour, image editing, and an upper case and symbol selection which bypasses keyboard mode changes.

At the time, it was reported to be in talks with phone manufacturers to get Force Touch into new flagship models in 2016.

“This exciting next step in human interface for smartphones will soon become the norm and highlights Synaptics’ leadership in force,” said Synaptics senior vice president Kevin Barber.

Last week reports appeared that Samsung was on the warpath to include Synaptics Clear Force technology in its upcoming S7 display, in an effort to counter Apple’s current market advantage.

This week another piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place with etnews.com reporting that Samsung was fast tracking Galaxy S7 preparation and production and was likely to announce it in early January. This is around the time of the global Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas.

There are other dimensions to the report such as a new category of “sub-premium” models but getting Force Touch onto Samsung phones asap is odds-on a big driver.

Samsung, however, is yet to confirm whether the Korean-based report is true or otherwise.

How closely Samsung’s implementation mimics Apple’s is something we don’t know. Apart from hardware, its performance will depend on the software that drives it, presumably layered by Samsung/Synaptics over Google Android’s latest Marshmallow operating system.

The urgency with which Samsung in particular and Android in general is moving is underscored by new market figures this week showing that Apple was gaining further market share across the world’s largest smartphone markets even before iPhone 6s even launched.

The report, published by Appleinsider.com and based on Kantar Worldpanel figures, said that Apple’s greatest gains, percentage-wise, were here in Australia, where the iOS share was up 8.5 per cent year-on-year, and that Android had tumbled 11.2 per cent in the three months to August.

In Australia 37.8 per cent of smartphone market’s handset sales were for iOS phones, and 53.1 per cent were for Android. That 53.1 per cent figure may look healthy but it is across all Android brands and smartphone categories. AppleInsider.com also reported a 5.6 per cent drop in Android take-up in the huge China market, with Apple gaining a similar amount.

The stage is therefore set for a huge Android fightback against the iPhone’s accelerating success in the new year. Get ready for the battle of the Force Touch screens — and may the Force be with them all.

* In another development, Apple Australia has announced that orders for its upgraded Apple TV box will start on Monday.