Samsung delays launch of Galaxy Home for second time

Will we ever see the Samsung Galaxy Home? The company announced its Bixby-powered smart speaker in August 2018 alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, yet here we are nine months later without even so much as a concrete release date.

Samsung gave us a look at the Galaxy Home in November 2018 but gave no hints on a release date. In early 2019, Samsung said the device would land in April. It missed that date with little notice. Then, the company said it would land by the end of June 2019. However, now we have word from Samsung CEO Hyun-suk Kim (via The Korea Herald) saying that the speaker won’t land until sometime in the third quarter of this year.

“The Galaxy Home speaker, which will be the center of Samsung’s home appliances, is planned to be launched in mid-second half of the year,” Kim said. The Korea Herald confirmed that, according to other Samsung executives, “mid-second half of the year” refers to the third quarter of 2019.

That means it could be as late as the end of September before we see the smart speaker — which means it could launch a full year after Samsung announced it. How strange would it be if Samsung launched the Galaxy Home at its anticipated event for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10? It would be like déjà vu.

Every day that goes by, the smart speaker market gets more and more difficult to enter. Right now, Google and Amazon own the landscape, with not even Apple able to make a dent with its expensive HomePod. With Samsung’s push for the Galaxy Home to be a high-end sound machine coupled with the idea that the smart speaker isn’t likely to feature Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant, it’s probably going to be a hard sell whenever it does land.

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