Over the last year the relationship between Samsung and Microsoft has been going from strength to strength when you consider the at first it appeared to be simply a matter of getting some software preloaded to the recent work being done on improving the integration between Windows 10 and Samsung smartphone devices via the Phone app that comes with Windows 10. Some news has come out recently that it appears that Samsung is going to throw their chips in with Microsoft and the first part of that is moving their customers off their own in-house cloud service to one provided by Microsoft (link). I think that this is part of a larger movement away from its own cloud based technology but if it were me I could go a lot further than what they’re doing today.

What would I do if I was donned dictator of Samsung and Microsoft? I would merge Microsoft Pay and Samsung Pay, get rid of the individual Samsung applications in favour of Microsoft ones, work with Microsoft to develop a ‘Android Marketplace’ to replace the Galaxy Store, greater integration in with Windows 10 including music synchronisation capabilities within the Phone app (which turn links into the Music app). There is a lot of potential for Samsung and Microsoft to work together – Samsung corralling customers towards Microsoft’s services and then Samsung getting a cut of revenue bought in from subscriptions a long with a share of the processing fees that the new Samsung/Microsoft Pays would bring in from customers using it on their computer, smart phone, watch etc.

Regarding the next Samsung Galaxy smartphone, there is a rumour that although Samsung have announced the Exynos 980 and 990 there is a rumour that neither of them will go into their flagship phone next year. It’ll be interesting whether this turns out to be true and whether the flagship SoC will make use of the alliance that Samsung has with AMD to yield the sort of GPU performance that’ll really push it over the edge in terms of being able to compete with Qualcomm and Apple. The other interesting part is the new Samsung 5100 series of their modems support CDMA (along side LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA, GSM/EDGE) which makes me wonder whether Samsung will go global with a Exynos 1000 (assuming it is branded that) so that they have a single platform rather the dual Qualcomm/Exynos they have today.