South Korean OEM Samsung is riding high on the success of its Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus flagships. The company’s latest smartphones have reportedly sold 5 million units worldwide since the duo was launched on April 21. While 2016 was a disastrous year for Samsung, with the voluntary recall and subsequent ban of it Note 7, 2017 has so far has been shaping up well.
Samsung is in the spotlight once again, this time due to the rumored Galaxy Note 8, the successor of the doomed Note 7 phablet. The dual rear camera setup Apple introduced in its iPhone 7 Plus has taken the smartphone market by storm.
This is the new trend, and almost all OEMs are now trying to incorporate the feature in their future smartphones, to gain an edge in the hotly-contested space.
It was previously rumored that the Galaxy S8 series would be the first Samsung smartphones to house a dual-camera setup. However, these assertions remained confined to being rumors. Now, the same theory is being applied to the rumored Galaxy Note 8. It was said that the idea to incorporate dual cameras in Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ was scrapped due to the cost issue. However, given that Apple is now thinking of upgrading its Dual Camera technology to integrate facial recognition features, Samsung will have to pull up its socks to stay on equal footing.
Note 8 getting a dual camera? Yes say, analysts
Although Samsung has not given an official confirmation regarding the inclusion of a dual camera in its upcoming Galaxy Note 8, an analyst from Daishin Securities believes that this rumor will come true. Park Kang-ho from Daishin Securities states that Samsung will not be able to ignore this feature any longer since the dual cameras stole the spotlight at the MWC.
Kang-ho’s statement gets further support from research firm Techno Systems Research. Analysts at Techno have stated that the dual camera smartphone numbers in the global market would increase from 76 million units last year to 600 million in the next three years. Thus, Samsung fans can expect Galaxy Note 8 to come with a dual-camera setup sporting 13-megapixel telephoto lens and 12-megapixel wide-angle lens, both equipped with 3X optical zoom.
Who else has the technology in place?
Apart from Samsung, several Chinese smartphone makers such as Vivo, Oppo, and Huawei have already jumped on the bandwagon to integrate dual cameras in their smartphones due to high demand from consumers. The best-selling premium handsets in China for the first quarter were phones with a dual camera setup, such as Vivo’s Xplay 6, Huawei’s Mate 9, and Mate 9 Pro.
