2020 has been a strange year, even for the tech industry. But the quirkiest of them all was Apple’s decision to drop the charging cable and adapter from the box. Shocking as it may sound, Samsung is willing to follow suit by skipping the charger with its S21 flagship smartphone.
The notorious trend: No charger out of the box!
Samsung was caught mocking Apple for eliminating the charging brick and the EarPods from the packaging. Yet reports suggest that the Brazilian electronics certification body, Anatel has come across the fact that certain regions across the globe will be receiving the S21 without the charger.
While Apple has been known for starting infamous trends that other smartphone OEMs end up blatantly copying, Samsung has always had an eye out for such opportunities to crack a quick joke. Looks like however, the joke’s on Samsung as they remove their posts from various platforms relating to such mockery as the company heads forward to S21’s launch.
While there’s no absolute word out suggesting if it will be definitive move across all markets like Apple did with the 12 line up. Samsung might provide the charger to customers who ask for it just like they did with their bundled AKG earphones that they chose to exclude in the US market for the Note 20 series.
The no-charger-in-the-box approach is likely to gain momentum in the near future. One big reason to support it up is the consequently smaller packaging that results in lesser costs for the manufacturer to bear for logistics and packaging. The environmental aspect of this is still debatable as Apple and likely Samsung will be selling the charger separately anyway.
However, as technology creeps into homes more and more, it is highly likely to have various power bricks and cables already available at the users’ disposal. On a side note, the better way to handle this situation is to provide an option for the customer to choose from — one with and one without the accessories (i.e. the charging brick and earplugs) with the later ones costing lesser.
The Galaxy S21 series is expected to include three models, a vanilla Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21 Plus and Galaxy S21 Ultra which is rumoured to include S-Pen support. The S21 will be powered by the latest SD888 SoC or the much anticipated Exynos 2100 and hence 5G connectivity options. Samsung will move out from its edge display and have a flatter 6.21″ Infinity-O display for the S21 while its elder mates will get larger displays. The Ultra might continue with the curved display with a size in the range of 6.7″ to 6.9″ with a hole-punch for housing the camera.