Samsung Galaxy S III: Features which make it Unique

The Samsung Galaxy S III has been announced with much fanfare. So what has changed in Samsung Galaxy S III that is different from Samsung Galaxy S II? The Display? The Processor? The OS? Yeah.. Yeah.. All of those have changed. The Galaxy S III now sports a ‘Super AMOLED HD’ display. The processor is now quad-core and the phone now comes with ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ as the default OS.

All of these are fine and yes they represent an improvement over the previous Galaxy. But, the real improvement shows up in the following features:

Smart Stay

More and more smartphones are being manufactured with 4.5+ inch displays that have made many people want to read articles, magazines or books on their smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy S III is no exception as it has a 4.8 inch display that will enable people to read them without any problem. But, how many times have you been faced with the following situation: You are reading an article and suddenly the display turns off. You had to press a button or touch the display each time to wake the screen up. Samsung has taken note of such a situation and has come up with a smart solution. It has put the front camera to work. If you have enabled the ‘Smart Stay’ option, the display doesn’t turn off while you are looking at it

Pop-Up Play

You are watching an interesting video and you just remember that you have to send out a short e-mail urgently but you do not want to stop watching the video. While previously this wasn’t possible, worry not, as Samsung has addressed this situation too with ‘Pop-Up Play’. This feature allows you to play a video in a pop-up window that can be dragged around the screen while you are interacting with other apps. So you want to continue watching a video while you are browsing through that photo gallery, you can happily do it now!

Direct Call

You are sending an SMS to a person and suddenly you feel that it is better to talk to them. Now, how many times has this happened to you, courtesy: Your Girlfriend!! Now, you can just hold your phone to your ear and the phone will automatically dial their number. This makes you avoid cancelling the message, going to the contact list and dialing their number. Pretty handy, isn’t it?

Buddy Share

You have gone on a trip to a place with your friends and you have captured many photos using your smartphone. If your friends want those photos too, you normally upload it on a cloud storage site and give your friends the link to download the photos. But, the buddy share feature lets you avoid that complicated process. When you have tagged your friends in the photos, you can send those photos instantly

Social Tag

You are browsing through the photo gallery and you suddenly want to view what the current status messages of people in the photo. Woah! This is one feature that even many people wouldn’t have even thought about. With the help of the Galaxy S III, it is now possible.

All the above features, which the Samsung Galaxy III comes integrated with now, present an indisputable case that smartphones are increasingly becoming smarter. It now remains to be seen how much smarter they can become in the coming future.

Stay Tuned..!!

Milking the Galaxy: Journey from Galaxy S to Galaxy S II

I bet that reading the title would have made your mind wander off to the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy in which our planet Earth is a teeny-tiny part. Well, let me bring you back to it. I am talking about the ‘Galaxy’ range of smartphones and how Samsung’s marketing and operation teams worked together in a cohesive fashion to generate mind boggling revenues for the company.

It all started when Samsung announced the ‘Galaxy S II’ smartphone at ‘Mobile World Congress’ at Barcelona in February 2011. Samsung declared that the smartphone would be released in the world markets starting from its homeland in April and yes, true to its word, the ‘Galaxy S II’ has been released in almost every major world market till date and it has been a resounding success everywhere.

Almost all of you know that the smartphone has redoubtable specifications and has gained the approval and praise of almost every tech enthusiast in the world. But, if you view the whole ‘Galaxy S II’ exercise from the business point of view, you will get to know the real thing.

Understand that there are two technologies that are most prevalent in the market today: GSM and CDMA. While the GSM versions of the phones work on different carriers by just changing the SIM card, the CDMA versions are locked down to a specific carrier. Samsung originally released the ‘Galaxy S II’ bearing the model number GT-I9100 with the ‘Android’ operating system, a GSM version. On May 9, 2011 they announced that they had received 3 million pre-orders for the smartphone.

Samsung was very quick to foresee that it wouldn’t be able to meet the huge cumulative demand from all the markets. There is a very good reason for it. As you would have already got from my previous posts, The ‘Galaxy S II’ uses two important components manufactured by Samsung itself. The display ‘Super AMOLED plus’ is manufactured by Samsung and the SoC (System on Chip) i.e. Exynos 4210 is also manufactured by Samsung. So, Samsung had taken the help of Nvidia. It launched a Tegra-2 powered version (GT-I9103) of the ‘Galaxy S II’ and named it ‘Galaxy R’ also called the ‘Galaxy Z’ in Sweden. This European version of the ‘Galaxy S II’ didn’t get a ‘Super AMOLED plus’ screen and instead settled for an ‘SC-LCD’ display and a reduced 5 megapixel camera instead of the 8 megapixel camera that the original came with. But it was also priced lower as compared to the ‘Galaxy S II’ GT-I9100 version.

In order to compete well in the relatively lesser priced smartphone section, Samsung released another version called ‘Samsung Galaxy W’. This doesn’t have a dual-core processor but instead settles for a single core 1.4 GHz Qualcomm processor with an ‘SC-LCD’ screen and a 5 megapixel camera. It was also priced lower as compared to the original ‘Galaxy S II’ version in order to compete well.

In many of the world markets, 4G technologies had already been in place and Samsung also saw an opportunity there. The originally released ‘Galaxy S II’ did not have LTE (Long Term Evolution – A 4G Technology) baked into it. So Samsung released a variant of the ‘Galaxy S II’ called ‘Galaxy S II LTE’ and ‘Galaxy S II HD LTE’ on August 28, 2011. While the ‘Galaxy S II LTE’ has a 4.5 inch Super AMOLED display, the ‘Galaxy S II HD LTE’ sported a 4.65 inch SuperAMOLED 720p display.

Samsung saved the Canadian and the American markets for the last. In America, Carriers (Service Providers) tie up with mobile companies and sell CDMA versions at subsidized rates. Normally the contracts have duration of 2 years after which, the user gains ownership of the phone. Samsung tied up with ‘Sprint’, ‘T-Mobile’ and ‘AT&T’ carriers and offered ‘SPH D710’, ‘SGH T989’ and ‘SGH I777’ respectively. All of these are variants of the ‘Galaxy S II’ smartphone. The ‘T-Mobile’ version was released with a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor instead of the Exynos CPU as the Exynos CPU wasn’t compatible with T-Mobile’s network. There are other differences between the models but they are minor. Samsung was able to bring the entire ‘United States of America’ under its purview with this release strategy. Currently, Samsung is also selling the ‘Galaxy S II Skyrocket’ for ‘AT&T’ (SGH-I727) which is an improvement over the original version that the carrier originally got. Similar to the strategy followed in the US, Samsung also hooked up with carriers like ‘Rogers’, ‘Bell’ and ‘Telus’ to cover the Canadian market. Samsung also launched a ‘Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 SoC’ powered ‘Galaxy S II’ which most people feel might be due to a deficiency of the ‘Exynos 4210’ SoCs. The ‘OMAP 4430’ chip offers a relatively similar performance as compared to the ‘Exynos 4210’ chip.

The point to be noted is that, Samsung has successfully been able to penetrate all the major world markets with the myriad variants of the ‘Galaxy S II’ smartphone while not compromising majorly on any of the original characteristics that had made the phone such a popular device. If we consider the BCG matrix, when the ‘Galaxy S II’ was released in April, it was a ‘STAR’ and it has now become a ‘CASH COW’ which Samsung is looking to milk. This also reaffirms the relevancy of a popular proverb: ‘Make hay while the sun shines’. J

As we approach the end of another eventful year, one of the Samsung representatives has said that the world will witness the successor to the ‘Galaxy S II’ which, as you might have already guessed by now, is the Galaxy S III’ (to be released at Mobile World Congress at Barcelona in 2012). Samsung has surely had a hell of a lot of fun with the ‘Galaxy S II’ this year. Hopefully it will deliver again with the ‘Galaxy S III'.

Stay Tuned..!!