Samsung moved to the CityCube, a separate area from the rest of the fair – although still on the Messe grounds – last year, and remained there for the 2015 show. Because the company has so much space, it shows B2B as well as consumer products, household appliances as well as consumer electronics.
A second-generation smartwatch, the Gear S2, was Samsung’s flagship device this year. We criticised the original Gear S for a variety of factors, including its design (too chunky) and the ‘walled garden’ approach that Samsung had adopted. Both have changed in the new model.
The Gear S2 is slimmer than the Gear S (11.4mm vs 12.5mm), with a new 1.2″ circular AMOLED display (360 x 360) – it is more in keeping with the design of the Apple Watch. In a fashion-oriented product like smartwatches, this is important.
A rotating bezel and two buttons (Home and Back) have made control easier. Touch is still featured as an input method. The watch runs Tizen on a dual-core 1GHz processor, and features NFC and wireless charging.
Importantly, Samsung has stepped away from trying to lock users into its ecosystem. The Gear S was only compatible with the newest Samsung phones. However, the S2 will work with any Android phone – or iPhone (this move is going to open Samsung’s watch up to a much wider audience – it’s just a shame that many potential customers will already have purchased an Apple Watch! – TA).
Samsung was also showing the new S6 Edge+ and Note 5 (Samsung Beats Apple to Flagship Punch), which we were able to get some hands-on time with. Samsung had made sure to tether the Note 5 stylus using the end that could be accidentally inserted into the phablet (Design Flaw Breaks Note 5 Pen Detection) – not that we’d have purposefully tried to do that in the name of science, of course! The Gear VR ‘headset’ was also on show; the resolution is better with the new phones (S6 Edge+, Note 5, etc), but pixels were still very visible. Because the lenses zoom in on the screen so much, this is a problem that is unlikely to change in the near future.
One new TV was being shown on the stand: the JS8000, a 55″ flat SUHD TV. It is the first flat model in this series, with the Tizen OS, a quad-core processor and twin tuners. There were no more specifications available, but Samsung did mention that the TV is planned for this year. All other sets on the stand were existing models, like the JS9500, or concepts, like the 82″ 21:9 UltraHD S9W.
We’ve written from time to time about streaming gaming services – Nvidia and others have shown the power of cloud-based GPUs etc and it’s interesting to see Samsung sign up with Gamefly. There were few details available at the show, but the company is an independent one that supports Amazon Fire TV in the US, Bouyges Telecom Bbox Games in France, Meo Jogos in Portugal and CJ Hello in Korea as well as Samsung smart TVs globally. The firm says that you need a minimum of 5Mbps of connectivity (8.5Mbps recommended) and 802.11n Wi-fi to support 1280 x 720 gaming with 30fps.
The streaming service is chargeable and there are around 40 games currently available, which are marketed in bundless from around $7 per month.
It also has a library of over 8,000 titles from consoles (including PlayStation, XBox and Nintendo). Games can be rented or bought in the US and the firm has plans with 1 to 4 games available at a time. This is similar to the Netflix/LoveFilm DVD rental system.
