Mobile users chomping at the bit for the new-new thing won’t have to wait much longer. Seven different US carriers will carry the Galaxy S4 by May. That means you can get it an array of not only traditional, but also prepaid carriers. Chances are Samsung will sell millions upon millions of units and make the S4 the best-selling Android handset to date. Yet the smartphone giant could already be falling behind.
As noted in March, the S4 launch wasn’t revolutionary. Samsung upped the stakes with a larger screen, though it already had that with the Galaxy Note and Note 2. It also added more face-recognition features. With the S3 you can keep your screen lit up just by continuing to look at it — a wonderful and useful feature. With the S4 you can pause video just by looking away, which seems like more of an annoyance than anything, and scroll down web pages when your eyes reach the bottom of the screen (which seems like a recipe for bugs). To that I say:
So what?
The more I think about it, the more the S4 just seems to be riding the coattails of the S3 and the S2, both of which were enormous successes. There’s nothing really new feeling about the S4, and in fact it makes me glad I got the S3 rather than wait for the new-new thing. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Apple released a phone this fall that represents a much bigger upgrade over the iPhone 5 than the S4 is over the S3.
Perhaps one reason I remain unimpressed is because one unexpected company released a wonderful, potentially revolutionary software feature. Facebook has been focusing on mobile for years now, but the output has mostly come in the form of bland apps. The Android app in particular looks kind of shoddy. Apparently, a mobile app is not at all Facebook’s end game. Instead they created an Android overlay that is comparable to a manufacturer skin such as TouchWiz. Yet they added one feature that we will likely see copied in many messaging apps.
Chat Heads is awesome. This is coming from someone who rarely uses Facebook chat and the Facebook Messenger app. Instead of requiring you to be in a single app to conduct an instant message chat with someone, you will see a notification right on your screen. And this isn’t your standard notification bar ping. It’s right at the top of your screen, awaiting your attention.
Sure, ChatHeads has the potential to annoy users. But I honestly believe that is an effect that will diminish with time. Eventually people will realize that messaging is an enormous part of mobile, and that instant notification — right in front of your face — of new messages can be hugely useful. Expect many developers, including Google itself with Google Talk, to create a similar messaging feature. Surely they want their messages passing through to all apps.
It is the first implementation, so Chat Heads is far from perfect. One feature I’d like to see is the ability to control who gets to interrupt you. I don’t want random high school person to have the ability to interrupt anything I’m doing. When they message me, it can go to the normal notification bar. In other words, we need a whitelist for Chat Heads.
That concept can extend to all other messaging apps, including email. Imagine if the Gmail app adopted this. You set a whitelist of people whose email you want to see as an interruption. You’re checking your fantasy baseball team, and all the sudden Ed’s face appears at the top of your screen. He just replied to your email, which you’ve been awaiting for hours. Previously you’d have to drag down the notification bar to see if the message is from Ed, and if you have multiple new messages you have to click through to the Gmail app.
Overall, the concept of Chat Heads is far more powerful than anything Samsung announced last March. Even though it costs between $150 and $200 up front, more people will likely buy the S4 than download Facebook Home. But almost everyone will download Facebook Messenger, which is where Chat Heads live. And that could have a bigger impact than the eye-based features that Samsung introduced.
The lesson: your technology might be neat and novel, but unless it creates solutions, it’s not going to be as big a hit with consumers.
The post Samsung’s Big Phone is Coming, but Facebook’s Big Feature Means More appeared first on MobileMoo.