According to a new report coming out of its home country of South Korea, Samsung is planning to bring a few new features to its more affordable smartphones in the future.
We’re talking about fingerprint sensors as well as support for Samsung Pay (and NFC with it). An unnamed source allegedly said that “Samsung is planning to deploy fingerprint sensors in budget smartphone models”, although it’s unclear what the company’s exact definition of “budget” could be.
This shows that Samsung is feeling the heat from Chinese smartphone makers, who have started including fingerprint scanners in even lower-midrange offerings recently. In fact, for the same price, the Chinese makers always offer more features than Samsung, so the Korean company probably feels like it has to act in this regard. It is currently the top dog in 14 out of 15 emerging smartphone markets, and we assume these moves are meant to ensure that won’t change in the future.
Unfortunately no time frame was mentioned for Samsung launching fingerprint sensors in cheaper devices. Yet Samsung Pay is reportedly going to show up in new mid-range and low-end phones as early as the first half of next year. This will happen for the company’s Android handsets. Analysts are still divided in their opinions of whether Samsung will bring its payment system to Tizen smartphones too. We should see some high-end Tizen offerings next year, though.
[“source-gsmarena”]
