An echo of what I said the other day

Android Circuit: Galaxy Note 5 Abandons Loyal Users, Google Kills Google, Samsung's Dangerous Gamble

Samsung’s sales for the year are down, and the mobile division saw profits drop 35% in the last quarter. The Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+ are handsets that simply have to sell. Which is why I think stripping the microSD card and the removable battery – both of which were in the previous Galaxy Note handsets – is a big risk for Samsung to take.

Historically that made the Galaxy Note range a potent combination of size and power, and for a number of years there was genuinely nothing else close to it on the market. Now that the competition has caught up and is offering handsets with broadly matching specifications at a lower cost, Samsung has lost the first mover advantage and instead is relying more on marketing and less on hardware differentiation.

The loss of microSD support and the removable battery weakens the Galaxy Note 5 offering compared to other manufacturers. It also weakens the phablet when compared to last year’s Galaxy Note 4. If your older handset is perceived as a better handset than the latest model, then something is wrong.

So it looks, with the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+, the trend towards losing the important features that make fans loyal, such as removable expansion SD cards and batteries, continues. I'm going to keep my Samsung S5 as long as I can, and if I have to, look elsewhere if this continues. I'm sorry, Samsung, you're gutting your products in the name of form and undercutting your fan base.