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Wanted to add one last thing before I go. If ruggedized phones were that important people WOULD switch for it. Just look at the iPhone when first released over the course of 4 years. AT&T gained 20M customers practically overnight. It forced Verizon to give in to Apple terms. I don't see the Active doing so over the past 3 years.
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I have said over and over this is my conjecture versus your conjecture. Neither one of us has a solid number on the unit sales of the Actives.
But I think there is a market for rugged phone features. With the S5 series it was difficult to disentangle rugged versus non-rugged. The regular S5 had one of the most desirable features of rugged phones, the IP67 water resistant rating. That gave buyers reduced incentive to buy the Active Most reviews of the S5 mention water resistance as a significant selling feature.
Unlike the S5 series the S6 series clearly dilineates rugged versus non-rugged. I think there is a market for these mil spec features and I predict the S6 Active will sell substantially better than the S5 Active did.
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From someone who used to sell these devices and who used to see probably 200 customers a week, the rugged devices were asked for about 1% of the time.
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Past "ruggedized" have been weak sellers because they requires huge sacrifices of processor speed, memory, screen, camera or all of the above to get rugged features. Consumers will not sacrifice all of these factors for water resistance and/or dust resistance -that doesn't mean they don't care about these features. It doesn't mean a phone offering Ip67 certification can't be successful.
Verizon has never offered a "rugged" phone that wasn't severely lacking in most, or all, of the performance factors.
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We'll wait and see. I still say the sales will be less than 10% of total sales and not worth batting an eye for. It's a niche market today.
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I am telling you that they weren't asked for. Not because they were up to snuff on specs but because people did not want them. They would rather have the more popular devices and put an Otterbox or Lifeproof case on it.
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People don't want water resistance as a feature? How do you know?
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10% of what exactly?
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Total sales of the S6. Your predictions from what Samsung says is 20% of their shipments would be the S6 Active worldwide. So that means they'd have to sell out to hit the 20% mark which will never happen worldwide.
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More specifically, how can you possibly say it's not the technology. Most consumers want water resistant and durable festured in smartphones.