Samsung has a difficult year ahead of them. They are under pressure to deliver with the new line of phones. The S4 didn't sell as expected and other manufacturers have caught to them, offering same or better performance while having a better build quality and/or less software bloat. Touchwiz is awful and despite having a lot of muscle power, even a Samsung flagship phone will still feel sluggish and laggy at times.
But it has been Apple's own fault, that Samsung became so popular. Offering only one screen size has been a huge mistake. A mistake, which seem to be hopefully corrected, if rumors are true. I would like to argue, that there are many users like myself: I would have loved an iPhone with a larger screen size but because of nonavailability I bought a big screen Samsung, which was 'good enough' initially and a few software compromises were ok to accept. In the long run, I wasn't impressed with the truly awful sluggishness of my Note and installed CyanogenMod but that is a different story.
Never used the stylus and in the 2+ years the Samsung Note and its successors are available in the market, i have seen once (!) a person, actually using it. And mind you, the Note Series (1,2,3) is hugely popular in HK. You see them everywhere. But just like myself, when I talk to my colleagues, who have a Note or S3/4, most of them are not so impressed about the Software and not so keen on buying another Samsung phone again.
If Apple will finally offer a bigger phone this year, then a flock of Samsung customers will go back to Apple
