Rumors are finally rampant regarding Samsung's next flagship phone. The three main rumors are that it will have (some varying degree of) a special, curved display, cleaner software, and a housebuilt processor. Here are my thoughts about it.
Lots of people are pointing to the Galaxy S6 coming in an edge variant, not unlike the Note Edge that was released in the fall. Some suggest that the main S6 will have two curves on it, covering both the left and right sides. Others, however, are suggesting that Samsung will look to mimic YotaPhone and put a screen on the back of the phone as well as a curve on the side.
If Samsung decides to put curved displays on the Galaxy S6, I will not be terribly impressed. It'd be yet another use impaired gimmick from the king of gimmicks, which is exactly what they don't need right now. But, if they do decide to go the way of the YotaPhone, they could create a really compelling success. The dual screen display could be useful, if implemented well, and Samsung is probably the only major company that could actually succeed in the implementation of this idea.
Will Samsung drop TouchWiz in the Galaxy S6? If so, would their phone be compelling? There is certainly a huge market for stock Android on more phones, particularly Samsung phones, but I'm not sure that I believe Samsung would be willing to do this. Also, most mainstream users actually like Samsung's TouchWiz, so I'm not entirely sure that it's a good idea to get rid of it.
Samsung is rumored to be using a home brewed processor instead of a Snapdragon. This would essentially knock us back to the pre-2013 Android roots of a dysfunctional app store where nothing was universal. This is a bad thing. Snapdragon is the reason for so much success in Android recently.
I remember the days when Android apps weren't universal in any definition of the term. Trying to download anything was a nightmare, because it was almost always guaranteed to not support my processor. The beauty of the dominance of Snapdragon processors is that recently, apps have run basically universally on all ~2013 and later devices. This is one of the biggest advantages of competing platforms: if you can download it, it runs. Dividing the ecosystem is a bad move, even if Samsung has the biggest market share in US Android.
In the end, I think the Galaxy S6 is going to be a really telling device for Android going forward. It may start a trend, and change the entire mobile industry, or it may create division within Android, rotting away the ecosystem, or it could totally flop and kill Samsung. We'll see what happens.
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