What does the Samsung Galaxy s6 edge+ mean for Samsung and the venerable phablet?

Honestly, the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+'s purpose evaded me for a while. What's the point of an overblown S6 edge diverting momentum from the Galaxy Note5, which is one of Samsung's most impressive and feature-rich offerings? That's the wrong mentality to have, which I did realize, but struggled to figure out why. So I stuck with it until a few days before the launch event, where, at a meeting, Peter K. pulled out his iPhone 6 Plus and, unsuspectingly, made everything fall into place.

The Galaxy S6 edge+ is the Apple iPhone 6 Plus. By Samsung.

But why would Samsung care about Apple's doings so much as to devise not one, but two big screen behemoths to go head to head with the one from Cupertino? Well, since its introduction last year, the iPhone 6 Plus has become a best-seller in the large screen category. In the US alone, Apple's 5.5-incher took 44% of all US phablet sales in the first quarter of 2015 for itself. That's almost half the market eaten up by what's, basically, an oversized iPhone 6! There has to be a message hidden in there, somewhere.

So, isn't the Note5 enough of a big-screen, premium smartphone to stand on its own against Apple's best-selling phablet, and more importantly, his upcoming successor? Theoretically, it is, but it's got a self-image problem that prevents it from having the same pull. See, Note phablets are centered on productivity, coming in with a grand symphonic orchestra of features conducted by the S-Pen stylus. The accessory is so integral to Note devices, it's basically part of their organism, for no one besides Samsung plans its product design around fitting the entirety of a stylus inside a dedicated silo within the phone itself.