Samsung

A brief history

Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chul as a trading company in Daegu, Korea. It expanded through textiles, food processing, insurance, and shipbuilding before entering electronics in 1969 with Samsung Electronics. Memory chips arrived in the early 1980s, the company became the world's largest DRAM producer by 1992, and the Anycall mobile-phone brand launched in 1993. The first Galaxy S smartphone in 2010 marked Samsung's pivot from feature phones to Android flagship leadership. Today Samsung Electronics is the world's largest manufacturer of smartphones by units shipped, the largest TV manufacturer by revenue, and the largest memory-chip producer overall — and it operates as a key component supplier to many of its own competitors.

What Samsung is known for

Samsung's signature trait is breadth. Few brands ship competitive products in so many categories at once: Galaxy phones and tablets, Galaxy Watch wearables, Galaxy Buds, Neo QLED and QD-OLED televisions, the Frame lifestyle TV, Odyssey gaming monitors, Bespoke home appliances, and the SmartThings home-platform layer that ties them together. The component side — Samsung Display, Samsung SDI, Samsung Foundry — makes Samsung simultaneously a competitor and a supplier to Apple, Sony, Dell, and others.

Tech strengths cluster in display panels (the company invented mass-produced AMOLED, ships most foldable OLEDs, and co-developed QD-OLED with Sony), memory (LPDDR5X, UFS 4.0, HBM3E), and now silicon (Exynos in some regions, custom ISP and modem work). Samsung has also gradually closed the software gap: the Galaxy S25 series ships with seven years of OS and security updates — matching Google Pixel and exceeding most Android peers — and One UI is now well-regarded for tablet/foldable scaling.

Where Samsung excels on vsMars

Samsung products appear in nearly every category we track. The Galaxy S and Galaxy Z lines anchor the upper bracket of the smartphones category and our best smartphones shortlist, with the Z Fold and Z Flip dominating the foldable subcategory. Galaxy Watch competes in smartwatches and on our best smartwatches list. On the display side, Samsung is the brand to beat in TVs (Neo QLED, S95 QD-OLED) and best TVs, and the Odyssey range leads our monitors and best monitors charts for high-refresh-rate gaming. Galaxy Buds appear under wireless earbuds.

Trade-offs to know

The breadth that defines Samsung is also its main weakness: quality varies more from line to line than at narrower brands. Bloatware and duplicate apps (Samsung + Google versions of nearly every system app) remain a fixture of One UI, and regional Exynos/Snapdragon splits mean two buyers can get materially different performance from the same model name. Galaxy Watch features beyond basic notifications still require a Samsung phone, narrowing the value proposition for mixed-platform households. On the TV side, Samsung's refusal to support Dolby Vision continues to be a real content-compatibility gap versus LG and Sony. Repair pricing is high outside the first-party network, and out-of-warranty parts availability is uneven. Finally, Samsung's marketing-spec premium — chips, panels, batteries — sometimes outpaces day-to-day improvements, and pricing on flagship Galaxy hardware now sits at parity with Apple in most markets.