Samsung has announced that it has revised its 2011 smartphone sales upwards following exceptionally strong sales of its Galaxy S II, which it expects to be further boosted after the positive reception to its Galaxy Nexus, Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) flagship handset. Further, it also expects to sell at least two million of its “phablet,” the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, which will help take the company over the top.
“We are pinning high hopes…on achieving sales higher than our previous plan,” A Samsung spokesperson said at a press conference, without revealing its expected sales figures.
The company recently reported on its Q3 results, which showed that its smartphone shipments were up 19 percent year-over-year at 71 million phones, shipped for the quarter. During its conference call, the company did not reveal exactly how many Galaxy S II’s it had sold, but estimates pointed to the company shipping in excess of 20 million GS2s. This compared with 17.07 million iPhones sold during the same period, making Samsung the world’s number 1 smartphone vendor for the quarter.
The Galaxy Nexus has so far only been released in Europe, but is expected to go on sale in the US on December 6. Although hit with a volume bug on launch, Google has said that it has worked with Samsung and fixed the bug so that handsets sold in the US can be expected to be free of the problem on its launch.
The Galaxy Note is a relatively unique product in the smartphone sector, being something of a cross-over between a smartphone and a tablet. Its centerpiece is a 5.3-inch 1280×800 Super AMOLED display that is bundled with a stylus that can be used to draw, handwrite notes and annotate screenshots. Let’s hope that Samsung does better with sytle of Cross-over than Dell did with the Streak.
