Rumor: To combat weak Galaxy S4 sales, Samsung to unveil the Galaxy S5 in January

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 10 Oct 2013

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was and still is a highly polarizing device. It feels like crap in your hand, but it has a gorgeous display, an amazing camera, an incredibly fast processor. Though you tend to forget all that when you turn it on and TouchWiz hits your face like a brick falling off the 12th floor of a construction site. Ask any tech journalist which device they preferred during the first half of 2013, and they’ll tell you, with zero hesitation, it was the HTC One.

In other words, the S4 wasn’t the success Samsung thought it would be, so there’s a new rumor coming out of Korea saying the S5 launch will be accelerated. How fast are we talking about? What if I told you that the Galaxy S5 was just 100 days away? As crazy as that sounds, it kind of makes sense when you consider that CES would be the perfect venue to suck all the attention out of the room. Mobile World Congress would be a venue for the Chinese handset players. And the iPhone 6 would be three quarters of a year away.

What do we “know” about the GS5? The Korean website goes on to say it’ll have a 16 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization, it’ll use a Samsung made Exynos processor instead of one from Qualcomm, and that’s pretty much it.

Should you believe this rumor? I’m going to vote yes, but I’ll remain skeptical.