As Samsung is looking for new ways to increase its profit, since the Galaxy S4 sales are not performing as expected, it has come up with the idea to offer extended warranty plans in the future, much like Apple does for its devices, which will be called “Samsung Protection Plus”. They have apparently already registered the trademark at USPTO, describing it as offering: “extended warranties on consumer electronic products and consumer appliances.”
The price of this will most likely not be very small, but if you tend to break phones a lot, and you live in US, where the standard warranty is only for one year, then you might want to consider it. If you live in Europe, where the standard warranty is 2 years, and if you tend to change your phones every 2 years anyway, then you might not need this, unless Samsung Protection Plus is offering more benefits and covers more situations than the standard warranty.
For example, Samsung could offer warranty if you happen to install other ROMs on your device, and you somehow brick it (very hard to do these days, though). If that’s too extreme for them, they could at least cover your phone if you unlock its bootloader. Right now you lose your warranty if you unlock the bootloader so this Protection Plus plan could cover that. I doubt Samsung would encourage this in any way, though, since they want you to use Touchwiz, but it’s one way they could go to entice European consumers especially to buy that expensive extended warranty.
American consumers should be persuaded more easily, especially if they’ve already bought Apple’s extended warranty in the past, and they want their phone covered for the whole period of their contract.
This could be a good move for Samsung, if the price is not too high, and if it’s something many have already asked Samsung to offer. Samsung may be able to offer it as soon as they can, even for older devices that are still in store, and probably won’t wait until a next flagship release to offer this, so if you’re looking to buy a new Samsung device soon, you should ask the store about it.