The Galaxy S7 was announced a couple of days back at the Unpacked event in Barcelona, Spain. While the tech world is reeling under its effects, there seems to be a major chink in the armour or is it so?
The leaks have pointed out that the Galaxy S7 will feature a USB Type-C port at the bottom but the reality seems entirely different. The handset features the good old micro USB port for all the data transfer and charging needs. The micro USB is a proven design but the USB Type C is the future and the lack of one on the Galaxy S7 will cause some major trouble to Samsung. Not immediately, but down the line when the USB Type C becomes a standard.
It is most likely that people will still be using the phone 2 -3 years down the line and Samsung had an excellent opportunity to make it future proof but it missed out for various reasons.
The first among the reasons is the virtual reality. Samsung has a brilliant Gear VR that plugs only into a micro USB port. Switching to a USB Type C would have alienated all the people who brought a VR headset.
“It’s because of our Gear VR ecosystem story. The Samsung Galaxy S7 plugs into your Gear VR, which has micro USB,” said Kolhatkar.”We want to make sure people who bought the headset six months ago aren’t disappointed and it works.”
Second among them is the fast charging technologies. USB-C provides a major speed boost for charging a battery but Samsung already has such a cutting edge technology in its phones and switching to a USB-C port just for that seemed a bummer.
All the accessories that are available right now are compatible with the micro USB. Putting the USB-C on the Galaxy S7 would have made all those accessories incompatible with the handset.
While all the world is cursing Samsung for not switching to USB-C, Samsung seems to have done the right thing by not transiting to a technology that is still in the infant stage.
