Samsung Galaxy S III Launches Music Hub: Can it Match Apple's iTunes Prowess?
Samsung Galaxy S III is the latest smartphone offering from Samsung and expectations are running high for this new smartphone. Nonetheless, Samsung coincides the launch with its own Music Hub, which is deemed to compete with Apple's iTunes.
Samsung recently announced that they will be offering Music Hub which would enabe users to stream their own selection of songs. Aside from streaming, this feature would also enable them to scan and match their whole home musical library with the Music Hub catalogue. This feature would only be available at the moment for Samsung Galaxy S III owners but there are future plans to expand this service for other Samsung models.
This feature can be availed for free or with a premium price plan which would cost around £9.99 per month. For the free plan, customers would have access to the store and they are entitled 30 seconds of free preview for any music before they could decide to download it or not. For premium plan service, users would be able to stream music without any limit from the Samsung library. They could tie up their personal home library to the system, which gives them access to their music whenever they are.
This is the first time Samsung opted to directly compete with Apple's music features offering, which could also make way for more infringement issues with the American firm.
Samsung admits that they are still beginners when it comes to this feature. T.J. Kang, the senior vice president of Samsung mentioned that the service was built from scratch.
"Samsung is not known for our content services; we make good hardware products but we haven't done much in the content space but that's changing. We are doing it to create a better experience for our users. There are things we could do better if we have complete control over all of the service," Kang explained.
The Samsung Galaxy S III is expected to be available in 28 countries upon its official launch.