It looks like you can't keep a good curve down. Samsung is reportedly bringing a third production line up to speed to build more curved screens for the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Bloomberg Business believes that this will allow production of the innovative smartphone to jump from two million to five million units per month.
Samsung Display now has three plants that make displays using organic light-emitting diodes, or OLED, which offer sharper images at lower power than most liquid-crystal displays. The new production line uses a facility south of Seoul, located near one of the company’s existing plants making curved screens.
The Galaxy S6 Edge has picked up critical acclaim around the world alongside the standard Galaxy S6, and early indications are that the more advanced handset has been selling out, with customers ready to wait for more stock on the S6 Edge rather than switch sales to the vanilla S6. Samsung's JK Shin has been forthright in the stock issues around the screen, citing lower yields than expected on the organic LED screen.
I'm still not convinced that such a critical announcement was the best spin to put on the sold-out handset, but it does not appear to have dampened demand for the S6 Edge. The production issues around the screen have also limited the numbers available. In a perfect world where the production issues were solved earlier in the design process I still feel the right decision would have been for Samsung to release only one Galaxy S6 model, and that model would have been the model with the curved screen.
Alas the production difficulties coupled with Samsung's financial performance in 2014 casting serious doubts over the retail performance of the Galaxy range, the South Korean company played it safe and went with a product mix of the vanilla S6 sporting its traditional flat screen/bezel arrangement, and the S6 Edge with its inspirational turn.
Given the accelerated production schedule, I'd expect the S6 Edge to outsell the vanilla S6 when the numbers are added together at the end of the year.
That's good for Samsung. Once of the question marks over the Seoul-based company was around innovation and implementing new ideas. The 'fast-follower' model of design and production allowed Samsung to capitalise on the rapidly changing smartphone market in the early years of the 21st century, but could it bring a new idea to the table when every smartphone was expected to have the same feature set?
So far, the answer is yes and the answer is the 'edge'.
The S6 Edge is still not perfect. While the hardware on each handset does the job, the associated software still needs work. There needs to be a much greater choice of 'information bars' that can be displayed on the edge of the screen, niggling issues like only showing the time automatically on the edge for a maximum of twelve hours a day need addressed, and I would really like to see TouchWiz implement a 'gutter' along the edge of the screen via software so video images and texts do not get physically wrapped around the screen.
These should all be possible in software updates delivered over the air (and I await to see what third-party developers will be offering in the near future). Samsung has an opportunity here to push the boat out and create something new, distinctive, and defensible, in the world of smartphones. It has taken on board the hardware issue and ramped up production. I hope that the software side of Samsung will also step up and deliver some much-needed change and continue to push the message of innovation that the S6 Edge carries from Samsung to the marketplace.
(Now read my in-depth review of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge).
