RECESSION must at times seem like war to some of its victims. Repossession of a home would be akin to invasion by an occupying army. Being consigned to the Dole queue following loss of employment might be analogous to being sent off to a PoW camp, with forced curtailment of consumer pleasures and the loss of contact with friends – at least those you thought were friends until they realised you could no longer afford to buy them pints in the local.
But, as in war, recession has an upside in the shape of rapid technological advances forced by the need to survive, at least for commercial organisations. Aircraft design, for example, progressed at a far more rapid pace during WWII than at any previous time.
What set me thinking about the drivers of accelerated technological development was the recent worldwide launch of Samsung’s newest mobile phone, the Samsung Jet, unveiled amid much razzmatazz at simultaneous events in Singapore, Dubai and London.
As I sat in London playing with a demo model of the new Jet and marvelling at the speed of its 800MHz processor, I realised that it was only six months previously that I had attended the Dublin launch of an earlier model, the Samsung Pixon, widely hailed for its 8 megapixel lens. So here we are just six months later, and Samsung has crammed an impressive amount of new and additional technology into another model no larger than the Pixon.
Samsung’s inventiveness is not of course driven by war – nor even by a struggle to survive, since the Korean manufacturer is already Number Two in mobile phone global sales, according to latest available figures from Gartner, the technology research specialist. No, what drives innovation at Samsung is its stated desire to outgun the Apple iPhone – which Samsung sees as its main rival, according to J. K. Shin, executive Veep and head of mobile communications division at Samsung Electronics. And those are no empty words; Gartner says Samsung’s quick response to demand for touch interfaces was the main reason for the phone maker’s growth in market share last year.
The battle for supremacy in the mobile phone market is not, of course, a two-sided contest between Apple and Samsung. Nokia, the world’s top-selling phone maker, is forming an alliance with Intel to develop new mobile platforms that look beyond today’s smart phones, laptops and netbooks. In an echo of the froth that bubbled up around mobile internet devices a year or two ago, the two manufacturers say they intend to collaborate more closely to develop a new class of mobile computing device based on the Intel architecture, combining PC-like performance with high bandwidth mobile Internet connectivity.
This Nokia battle-cry once more ramps up the tempo of the mobile phone war – and, doubtless, Samsung will rise to the challenge. Whoever emerges victorious, the real winners and the users – and the channel.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers