Samsung Needs To Make The S10 Look Different

While Apple is hard at work developing their top of the line 
, next gen iPhones, Samsung is also working on a fitting reply. But of late the Samsung's flagship Galaxy phones haven't been having the best of days. With the S9 performing poorly when it comes to sales, So much so that the S9, a 3 month old phone was overtaken in sales by Apple's iPhone 8, an 8 month old device that features a design straight out of 2014. You could argue that the S9's slow sales could be attributed to the fact that the S9 is pretty much an S8 with very few changes. Going by Apple's naming scheme the S9 is an S8s.

Design Sells

While a design doesn't really affect the functionality of a phone, designs play a crucial role when it comets sales. Looking at Apple's past sales it's easy to see that Apple has had huge spikes in sales when they came out with a new design especially in 2014, when they came out with the iPhone 6 design. A design refresh really gets the crowds going. Even with the iPhone X, The new design and features meant that the phone sold like hotcakes despite it's $1000 price-tag.

Samsung's Conundrum

So it seems that a design refresh might be the solution to all of Samsung's sales woes. But being the pioneers of the infinity display and them keeping around the headphone jack, It's safe to say that they've shrunk the bottom bezel as much as it's going to shrink. You see Samsung has worked themselves into a corner. Keeping the headphone jack around won't let them kill off the bottom bezel on the phone without making the phone ungainly thick, As the display has to wrap around onto itself as in the iPhone X. Adopting a notch would be a good way to implement a design change but Samsung with their ads have shown that they're against the notch going so far as to mock Apple for the notch. It would be hypocritical for Samsung to adopt a notch but Google did it with the headphone jack. Besides the blow back from Samsung adopting a notch would be huge. Right now the S9 is the way to go for someone who doesn't want a notch on their phones and Samsung can't really afford to enrage any part of it's userbase as it stands. The remaining way ( Which I can think of anyway) is a motorised approach kind of like what the Oppo Find X did ( The thoughts of which you can read here). It seems highly unlikely that Samsung would go for a motorised approach as these phones will be bought by way more people than when compared to the Vivo Nex or the Find X . The failure rates for motorised selfie cameras are way too high. So Samsung seems to be in a fix and it will be interesting to see what they cook up with the S10.