The Samsung Galaxy S4 was officially unveiled by Samsung just a month or so ago. The Galaxy S3 was an immensely popular phone; no wonder that Samsung sold more than 100 million units in less than one year. In view of the above, the Galaxy S4 was met with a lot of expectations. But, will the S4 manage to be as popular as its predecessor? This is a difficult question to answer: a year ago the S3 did not have a lot of competition but this year there are other companies which can give Samsung a hard time.
Sony is one of those companies which can eat up a good part of Samsung’s share of the market. Sony released its current flagship phone, the Xperia Z, before its competition and not surprisingly it had already sold about 4.6 million Xperia Z phablets in 40 days. When one considers the fact that the Xperia Z is yet to be released in the States, the figure looks pretty impressive.
HTC, which lost a great share of the marketplace is just a couple of years, is another company that has released some nice smartphones and phablets as of late. HTC Butterfy, a 5 inch phablet, was met with some very good reviews, but it was not publicized well enough. On the other hand, there was a lot of media coverage for the HTC One, HTC’s current flagship device. While it has a smaller screen size of 4.7 inches, it is a fantastic smartphone/small phablet that HTC can be very proud of. Given that the Galaxy S4 is only just hitting the shelves, the fact that the Xperia Z is about 30% cheaper comes to no surprise. This may cause the sales of the Galaxy S4 and Samsung’s sales to suffer as a result.
Apart from Sony and HTC, Samsung has a few other competitors when it comes to Android smartphones and phablets. These include, amongst others, LG and Asus as well as the Chinese giants Huawei, ZTE and Oppo. LG in particular, thorough its partnership with Google, have sold over 1 million Nexus 4 smartphones, even though the Nexus 4 had been out of stock for several weeks.
