By Stephen Schenck | March 15, 2013 6:59 PM
Samsung sure spent a lot of time at last night’s Galaxy S 4 launch event talking about the phone’s software; indeed, by comparison, hardware was esentially glossed right over, and we weren’t able to confirm several key specs until getting to see the company’s press release. For owners of existing Samsung phones, that may have gotten you a little hopeful, wondering if you might see some of these same features migrate to your older hardware. While the full picture isn’t yet available, some early comments from a Samsung exec sound very promising.
Samsung VP Nick DiCarlo spoke about the possibility with PCMag last night, and explains that Samsung is going to do its best to deliver GS4 software features to models like the Galaxy S III. “Anything that we can do that’s not dependent on hardware like infrared, we’ll definitely bring to all the flagship devices,” he explained.
Of course, that raises the question of just what is or isn’t limited by hardware. Luckily, most of what Samsung described last night sounds pretty hardware-independent, and there’s no good reason why we couldn’t see Group Play or camera-based scroll control show up in a future software update. Others might require more work, like the dual-camera video functions we saw, but could be possible with the right drivers. Things like Air View, though, you’ll have to forget about.
While it seems safe to say that the GS3 and Note II could get these updates, we wonder what fate has in store for just slightly older Samsung models. Will the original Note see any? We’ll have to wait and see.
