Watching a feature film on commercial TV with ads earlier this evening - not something I do all that often these days - I was interested to see Samsung's latest ad campaign referring to their new phones as : "Our toughest foldables yet."
Not the highest bar they're setting themselves there, I thought. Then I visited their web site and found this statement:
Designed to shatter expectations
Scratches and damage are no match for this phone. The exterior front cover and back cover on Galaxy Z Flip3 5G are made of the toughest Gorilla Glass yet on Galaxy Z: Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus™.
So, they're hoping that tackling their earlier foldables' bad reputation by pretending that last time wasn't a fiasco and emphasising the "toughness" of the glass this time round as if this was just a routine marginal upgrade from one generation on materials to the next 1 will get this generation of product over the hump.2
Time will tell how that works out for them. Not sure I like their chances.
- Just like a new generation of phones coming with a slightly higher screen resolution or a moderately better camera or a slightly faster processor compared to the last one. Is incremental change really going to do the trick given how far short the last generation fell, or are Samsung just hoping that most phone buyers didn't pay attention to the technical press in relation to the epic embarrassment they delivered last time round. ↩
- Wasn't the problem last time round less how "tough" the glass was and more that the bits of the design that needed to be flexible turned out to need to be incapable of coping with that need without seriously degrading their performance as glass to display an image on? Will it all turn out that it depends on what you mean by "tougher"? ↩