The Samsung Galaxy S6 family, encompassing the S6 Edge and the S6 Active, is the finest Samsung Galaxy smartphone to be released. The device is based around a new generation, 14nm Samsung Exynos 7420 processor, which offers high performance combined with low power and heat output. The Exynos is paired up with 3 GB of RAM and a choice of 32 GB, 64 GB or 128 GB of internal storage. Furthermore, the Galaxy S6 comes with wireless charging plus high speed charging (via a wire), a 16-megapixel rear camera and the usual blend of expected radios. In addition to the hardware features, Samsung slimmed down and optimized the TouchWiz interface and also included a theme engine.
The theme engine pairs up with one of Android’s greatest strengths: the ability to customize and completely change the user interface of the device. This has long been a reason why customers pick an Android device over an iPhone, because Apple’s iOS allows very few changes to the user interface. iPhone customers can pick a new hard case to keep their device safe and change the wallpaper, whereas with Android, it’s possible to change the look and feel by wallpaper, icons, widgets, fonts and of course applications, too. Samsung have hooked into the customizable nature of Android with their own theme engine and it’s no surprise that this has quickly become a very popular feature of the device with over more than six million theme downloads so far. The Avengers: Iron Man theme has been the most popular in Korea whereas Chinese customers have preferred the Urban theme. Across in the United States of America, the BMW i8 has been a popular popular theme whereas for Indian customers, the clean, simplistic themes have been downloaded more than the more complicated themes. Clean, simple themes detract less from how the device works compared with the more complicated looking designs.
Going forward, Samsung are going to start publishing themes from third party theme designers and this is likely to galvanise the market even further. Of course, Samsung are not the only manufacturer incorporating a theme engine into their device – HTC and LG have included theming support into their respective smartphones, following a number of custom ROM developers over the years. However, as the big names in the smartphone arena adopt the theming technology, so we can expect the number and quality of these themes to improve over time.
