Brand Samsung & Their New Galaxy S3 Set To Hurt Smartphone Vendors

COMMENT: When it comes to brand marketing Samsung is setting a screaming hot pace and the launch today of their all new Galaxy S3 has seen the Korean Company step their marketing up a notch to the point where brands like Nokia and Blackberry must now be pondering whether it’s worthwhile even competing.

At the Capitol Theatre today Samsung launched their Galaxy S3 before an audience of regional journalists, the event was big and more like a global CES event than a local smartphone launch.

Tonight Samsung will roll out a massive multimillion dollar TV marketing campaign and even before the launch was over the social networks were pumping out brand Samsung messages for the new phone which is a serious threat to Apple.

The device which went on sale at 11.00am today at carriers, Vodafone, Telstra and Optus is a product that easily integrates with other Samsung products. An image on the S3 can be flipped instantly to a Samsung Smart TV or PC.

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There are common apps such as Quickflix and Music Hub.

Realistically there are now only three brands in the market, Samsung Apple and HTC.

These are the heavy hitters who between themselves account for the juicy profit end of the booming smartphone market.

All three smartphone vendors are driving innovation because competition has dictated the pace, in the case of Samsung the S3 is their hero brand, the product that the Company is set to spend the next 12 months marketing in an effort to hold onto their #1 position.

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Under the bonnet innovation, from the screen to the processor to software, which in the case of the Galaxy S3 makes a mockery of what Microsoft, Nokia and Research in motion are dishing up as operating systems, is what makes the Samsung S3 a stand out smartphone that even Apple are going to struggle to compete against.

What Samsung software engineers have been able to do is layer over the top of Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich new intelligent capabilities from the way that the device stays on when you are looking at the screen to the way that you can move a video around on your screen while still being able to type a message.

The front facing camera of the S3 and the introduction of a proximity sensor called Smart Stay keeps the screen active due to the introduction of software that recognises when a user is making eye contact with the display screen.

Another innovative feature is Direct Call that will dial a contact if you raise the phone to your ear when messaging that person.

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During today’s launch it became clear that Samsung has Blackberry clearly in their sites with the introduction of functionality for virtualisation, active Exchange sync messaging and enterprise security solutions.

These are features that will make Corporations who invested in Blackberry software think twice about their smartphone offerings.

Tyler McGee, vice president of telecommunications with Samsung Australia said that the Company is investing heavily in shifting the image of the new phone to one that is both a “great” consumer product to being equally attractive to enterprise phone users.

For consumers there is a Quickflix app for getting access to movies, what is interesting is whether Telstra who have their own movie offering will allow the app to appear on versions that they sell.

 

The Quickflix service is $14.99/month with Samsung assuring media that it displays in standard mode to a TV screen, Samsung is hoping that carriers will provide bandwidth free so that users can access to Quickflix but nothing has been finalised.

The S3 sells for $899 outright for the 16GB model, with Samsung unable to provide a cost for the 32GB version.

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Yesterday Samsung admitted that there are problems with the “pebble blue” model of the S3 and after looking at the design of the review models we suspect that there is a problem with the location of the headphone jack and the lip of the back cover.