> The solution is to release fewer phones

My wife went into the EE shop ( UK mobile company ) recently to see what was on the market as her old Galaxy S2 was dying.

She came out with a list of six Samsung phones alone and a couple of Sonys. Is a Galaxy Alpha better than an S6? What's a Galaxy Mini? So bewildered by the permutations that she just threw away the list and bought a second-hand Galaxy S4 on eBay. Potential sale for Samsung lost.

Android vendors might think they're satisfying all possible market requirements but actually they're confusing potential customers. As you say, probably easier just to go to the Apple store and choose between two.

That's just a throwback to the featurephones of old, which were bewildering but somehow made Nokia and friends quite a bit of money.

Nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that Apple's success was also based on extreme simplicity: they sold just one model with a variable amount of memory. That's it. They didn't diversify their line until very recently, when they started to feel a bit insecure ("will people really like such a big screen? Fuck it, let's ship both") -- IMHO this simplification helped tremendously in selling to demographics that would have otherwise steered clear of "those nerdy gadgets".

Featurephone-like strategies make sense for upstarts looking for "a market, any market" and small players trying to carve niches; I would have thought Samsung was big enough to play smarter these days.

> bought a second-hand (...) Potential sale for Samsung lost.

Not necessarily a bad thing in a grand scheme of things. Apple's hardware for example is famous for commanding rather high price on a second-hand market. This trend helps a lot in justifying high price point for a new unit, further strengthening margins.

I agree. The Nexus 5 from my experience is the best Android out there. Now they're going to release a completely new model, instead of supporting/updating the current model, which is basically going to kill the phone for me.

strongly agree that, another problem is that even "premium" manufacturers don't make quick rom releases. minor android versions skipped and major updates come really late, more than 3 months at least.

Apple still gives support to 4 year old iPhone 4s. though it's lagging a bit. but after a year buying such premium device, you start to get updates late or no at all.

Sony supports their older model. As late as last year every Z-series could be updated to the latest Android.

Also they are waterproof and generally good. I love mine and sometimes walk around like a living advert for them - hoping they can stay in business for many years.