TouchWiz is a bit like a lightning rod around Ausdroid parts, and around other places on the web, for negative comments. For all its utility and its gloss, it attracts a lot of hate (rather like HTC’s Sense did in days gone by). The feedback is loud and frequent, if not across the board; there are certainly a fair number who quite like TouchWiz too.
However, according to South Korean press, Samsung may well be looking at a toned down version of TouchWiz on the rumoured Galaxy S6, which may be just around the corner with an MWC 2015 launch. The quote is that the next iteration of TouchWiz may be “Nexus-like”, which is certainly a big departure from what we’ve seen in the past.
BusinessKorea reports that Samsung is looking to reduce the memory footprint of its operating system, increase functionality by strengthening core features while eliminating unnecessary ones. They quote an industry source (so, get your salt shakers ready) as saying:
We are aiming to get rid of unnecessary functions and simplify our UI at the level of Google’s Nexus 6.
We know better than to ask Samsung for official comment on this, because they’ve not even confirmed the phone itself yet, but if that quote is even half true, this marks quite a change in approach. TouchWiz has always grown more bells and whistles with each successive Galaxy S release, and while the Galaxy S5 ushered in some minor changes, many considered it was still quite ‘heavy’.
If Samsung can trim TouchWiz down a bit, that fact alone coupled with next generation hardware could see the Galaxy S6 being one of the fastest, most responsive (and undoubtedly most popular) phones of 2015. Not long till MWC 2015 now, so hopefully we’ll know soon.
