Samsung attempts to strike a chord with new users

It is a rare moment when you can actually see power shifting from one giant company to another. And what better way to celebrate than by staging a Broadway musical?

That’s how Samsung chose to theme the launch of the Galaxy S4, its new Apple-challenging smartphone. They even had an all-singing, all-dancing child star, Jeremy Maxwell, who looks like he’s been locked in a Disney store since birth and fed only Twinkies and Mountain Dew.

The message to Apple Samsung has buried its South Korean heritage under a mountain of Rodgers & Hammerstein nostalgia and is staging the fight firmly in its competitor’s back yard.

As Jeremy tap-danced his way across the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall (I’m not making this up). Samsung shamelessly guilt-tripped parents for daring to photograph their own child prodigies using anything less than the 13 megapixel camera the S4 provides.

It is the kind of corporate hubris that induces neck-ache. But its wall-to-wall coverage shows Samsung are now generating (and capitalising upon) the kind of product launches that used to be the preserve of Apple.

The S4 also has exactly the kind of genuinely new features that have garnered Apple’s phones so many column inches in the past. It’s a “hands-off” unit – users can scroll webpages using their eyes, and control the screen by simply hovering the fingers above it.

Of course, today’s neat features can quickly become tomorrow’s Twitter backlash, as Apple found out with its voice recognition software Siri.

S4 on UK’s 4G

In the UK, we can expect a blitz of coverage for the S4. Why? Because its arrival on our shores in April coincides with a big push by network operators on 4G, the superfast mobile network.

Aside from the chance for marketers to think of clever ways to use the number 4, this confluence is probably the best sales opportunity the mobile networks have had since the first Apple iPhone – and they’re going to charge as much for it as they can.

As for Apple, it is hard to imagine they don’t envy Samsung its moment in the spotlight. But those predicting the Cupertino giant’s decline should hold back. As I’ve pointed out before – a $400bn valuation buys you a lot of parachute time (although I’ve just noticed that at the time I wrote that piece, it was $600bn – looks like the ground is coming up pretty fast).