Ecosystem, not device, is the future for Samsung
Samsung’s new flagship smartphones made the greatest splash of thousands of products launched at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but the bigger news from the Korean giant was revealed between the lines.
DJ Koh, president of Samsung’s mobile division, declared that market conditions were perfect for innovation and change, thanks to artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, more powerful processors, the Internet of Things and “the intelligence of things”.
However, little of this technology was demonstrated on the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ handsets Koh then unveiled. Instead, while showing off a range of new features that had long been anticipated by the market, he and other Samsung executives hinted strongly at the emergence of a new Samsung ecosystem as opposed to a range of disparate devices.
Smartphones and tablets will be designed to interact with kitchen and other household appliances, direct e-commerce partnerships will be forged with select retailers, and character rights will be secured across a range of content partners.
“Fragmentation and complexity will become a thing of the past,” said Koh. “Images are replacing words. The most important function of a smartphone is not making a call, but expressing the sentiment you want to communicate.”
That message won’t go down well with older users, who still think of phones as, well, phones, but Samsung seems to have a different audience in mind.
“Our younger users are becoming the dominant target market for high-end smartphones,” said Craige Fleischer, vicepresident of IT Mobile at Samsung Africa, after the launch. “The audience we’re addressing now is going to be the future. The technology we’re putting in that space and how it will be utilised is not only about the S9’s success, but about the future.”
In effect, Samsung is telling the market to “watch this space”.
That may explain why analysts were muted in their response to the new phones, with Ben Wood of CCS Insight telling Reuters they were “all about incremental gains over the S8”.
He said: “The S9 underlines the dilemma all leading smartphone makers are facing. Innovation in smartphones has plateaued and now it is all about marginal gains — be that screen technology, camera features and processing power.”
However, it is also clear that Samsung is looking beyond the phone, with the “multidevice experience” made possible by its strong position across numerous consumer technology and appliance categories.
Fleischer emphasised, however, that the user experience had to be seamless before any new feature or function was launched.
He pointed out that the product sets that were launched last week, such as the first multi-aperture lenses and optical zoom cameras on phones, had been considered with previous devices.
“Neither the cost of the technology, nor the ease of use of implementing that technology from a mass production perspective, was available. So, at times, we allow others to break with that technology before us.”
While rival Apple goes back to the drawing board after failing to convince the market that the “notch” in the new iPhone X serves a useful purpose, it seems that the S9 and S9+ are in themselves Samsung’s drawing board for the future.
Our younger users are becoming the dominant target market