Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled a new Galaxy Note phablet and a larger version of its curved-screen S6 edge smartphone on Thursday, marking a fresh bid by the South Korean company to revive momentum in its handset business.
Samsung is the world's top smartphone maker but its market share fell in the second quarter when the company released its critically acclaimed S6 models, squeezed by Apple Inc's upscale iPhones and cheaper offerings from Chinese rivals such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.
The manufacturer responded with S6 price cuts and moving up the Note unveiling from its usual early September spot, ahead of the latest iPhone launch expected in September, Reuters reported.
The event announcing the new gadgets was attended by more than 1,000 people, almost filling the Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York.
Samsung has made several hardware changes for the new devices, including a faster processor for the Galaxy Note 5 and increasing the screen size of the S6 edge+ to 5.7 inches from 5.1 inches on the S6 edge.
Samsung has high hopes for the Note.
"Each new version has been more popular than the last," said Justin Denison, vice president of product strategy and marketing for Samsung Electronics America.
Both are powered by Samsung's self-designed Exynos chips, the company said.
The phones will go on sale on August 21 in the United States and Canada.
The phones were not different enough, said Jonathan Roubini, editor-in-chief of Lab Reviews, "so that's why it's very hard for them to gain that market share from Apple."
Roubini said that they may frustrate Android users. "The phone looks very cool, but you cannot change the battery, and you cannot add memory to it."
Samsung also said its mobile payment service Samsung Pay will launch on Aug. 20 in South Korea and Sept. 28 in the United States.
There is no announcement of when the two new phones will be officially released in the local market. Local price comparsion website Emalls.ir has not listed either the Galaxy Note 5 or the Galaxy S6+ on their site.
Samsung's local office has not released any further information about the release date in Iran, although previous local unveilings followed roughly a month after the international debut.
In other Samsung related news, at the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung unveiled what appears to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters.
The PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package.
By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.
The secret behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256 Gbit (32 GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128 Gbit NAND dies that were commercialized by various chipmakers last year.
To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013 and then 36 layers in 2014, according to Ars Technica.
