Prepare your wallets folks, the official accessories for Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 are appearing online. The first ones appear to be a set of wireless charging covers, which Android Central discovered recently.
The covers will come in two colours and two different models. It appears there’s an effort on the part of Samsung to cover what most people are likely to want. There’s a simple rear cover replacement with Qi Charging receiver built in, or a S View cover with Qi Charging receiver built in. Both models appear (while this may change) to be available in either white or black, though it seems more than likely other colours may become available later.
All four covers should (in theory) work with any Qi charging mat you may have around and all are finished in the same dimple finish of the standard S5 casing. With indication that the replacement rear cover is likely to run around the AUD$35.00 – AUD$40.00 mark, I’m uncertain if they’re going to be a huge seller for Samsung, but lets be honest; if they didn’t make money from it would they do it?
There’s also the growing sense that wireless charging is pretty cool, so Samsung making these covers available may help woo those who have existing wireless charge capable handsets wanting to upgrade.
Is the price tag for basic, but official, Samsung accessories too much? Or given their status within the Android manufacturers is it justified?
Having to muck about swapping covers is kind of missing the point. If Samsung wanted to attempt to justify their overpricing, they would have included Qi receiver in the original phone AND included a Qi charging mat with the original package.
$999 for 32GB, who do they think they are, apple?
ITT: Fandroids learning that R&D costs money!
As a percentage of revenue across the entire Samsung organisation, they spent 5.8% on R&D (one of the highest).
So, we have ~100% markup on the price, but 5.8% spend on R&D….
And apple? That’s a 3% R&D spend
Next justification?
Yes, that means $11.6 BILLION US dollars per year spent on R&D. Not insignificant. I’ve done a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation on the S4. A teardown analysis of component costs shows they make up around $250 of a phone that sold at retail for around $750. Then, you factor in the soft-costs that sit on top of the hard costs: Wholesale profit margin – 30% Warranty and support costs – 15% R&D – 50% Marketing and Advertising – 100% Retail profit margin – 20% Total – 205% which makes for a retail cost of $762.50 – not too far off retail… Read more »
I’m still miffed about wireless charging not being built into the S5 (come on Samsung – imagine how much weight that would have lent to the whole dust/water proof part.. Not even having to open the port to charge it), but the add on case will have to do. Hopefully it will at least be vaguely the same size as the normal cover so won’t make every damn case useless.
Yeah I’m really surprised they wouldn’t just build it in. I have a Nexus 5 and a Nexus 7 and the wireless charging is something of a killer feature to be honest. I love it. Seems Samsung have missed a trick here.
Why include it when you can make money selling cases?