Supposedly coming out in April, the Galaxy Home is still nowhere to be seen, and Samsung hasn't offered as much as a peep about this delay.
Samsung originally announced the Galaxy Home smart speaker in August 2018, the same time the Galaxy Note 9 was unveiled. It was supposed to be its answer to other smart speakers dominating the market at the time, except that instead of Alexa or Google Assistant, it would be powered with Bixby, Samsung's proprietary digital assistant, which has been on Samsung's mobile devices since the Galaxy S8.
The Galaxy Home Is Missing
Then this past February, at the event where it first showed off the Galaxy Fold — which is also having its own problems at the moment, to note — Samsung said the Galaxy Home would be coming out in April. Well, April has obviously passed, and there's no Galaxy Home to be seen anywhere. What happened?
The Verge managed to get a hold of Samsung and asked about this. Representatives told the publication that Samsung is "planning to launch Galaxy Home in the first half of 2019," giving no more details beyond that. If so, that means the device is bound to come out at the end of June at the latest. In turn, that means Samsung has just a month left to build this device up for a successful launch, including marketing, hyping it up, and doing all sorts of promotions to get the word out there.
Is The Galaxy Home Having Problems?
Is Samsung's silence about Galaxy Home missing its schedule indicative of deeper problems on the device's development? For now, there's not enough evidence to substantiate such a theory. But as it happens, Samsung is having problems with the Galaxy Fold too after the units it sent to reviewers started breaking in unexpected ways. It too had to miss its launch date as Samsung investigates the issues. Co-CEO DJ Koh said recently that the phone has a new release date, which "will not be too late."
Perhaps Samsung is still evaluating the demand for smart speakers. Although Amazon has sold a lot of its Echo devices and Google is doing decently with its Home lineup, the market has proven a difficult space to break through when it comes to using anything other than Alexa or Google Assistant. Apple's HomePod, for example, which is powered by Siri, only managed to sell 600,000 units in its release quarter, according to estimates — just 6 percent of the total smart speaker market. Apple has since slashed the price by $50, which isn't typical of the Cupertino brand.
