Snippet: Harry Marks Survived the Galaxy S4 Launch ☇

Harry Marks, of Curious Rat fame, shares his experience while attending yesterday’s Samsung Unpacked event:

Out came the kid again, this time with that white box from the commercials. [Samsung’s head of mobile communications JK] Shin opened the box and pulled out Gwenyth Paltrow’s head the new Galaxy S4 to show to the crowd. Honestly, it looked just like the Galaxy S3, so to those who think Apple’s designs are getting “boring”, I hope you were watching this.

While watching the event myself, I noticed the lack of talk about Google, as well:

This brings me to a major issue that stood out. Google was not mentioned once, save for a single slide with “Android 4.2.2” on it. This tells me Samsung has no interest in what version of Android its phones are running, as long as everything can be custom-made or skinned. As far as it’s concerned, the Galaxy S4 is running Samsung OS.

Overall, I think the Galaxy S4 looks like a solid, but incremental update for Samsung, but hopefully this will end all the speculation from every analyst that Apple is going to get crushed by Samsung any time soon.