David Flynn15 March 2010, 1:59 PM
The Korean colossus is set to sharpen its focus on 3G-enabled netbooks and will shortly add Vodafone to its set of telco partners for mobile broadband.
Samsung will ramp up its 3G netbook offerings this year and it’s counting on the telcos to help drive mobile broadband bundles into the mainstream.
Speaking at the Samsung Forum in Singapore the director of Samsung Australia’s IT division, Philip Newton, said that Samsung would be “focussing heavily on 3G netbooks in 2010”.
“Business is expanding dramatically in the telco world as operators look for larger revenue growth from non-traditional (channels). We already have products with Optus and Telstra and we’re not too far away from having Vodafone.”
Newton told APC that Samsung’s 2010 netbooks would include quad-band 3G radio modules manufactured by Samsung itself “to address all networks in the local market.”
“We’re designing our own 3G modules to cover all four bands – including 2100MHz, 900MHz and 850MHz – so that one product can be put onto all bands” Newton explained. “Most quad-band modules don’t do both 850MHz and 900MHz, you get one or the other, but our quad-band module module does the lot.”
This will allow Samsung to range the same model across all carriers rather than manufacturer and market two slightly different builds – one for Telstra’s 850MHz Next G network and the other for the dual-band 2100MHz/900MHz networks of Optus and Vodafone.
This DIY approach plays to Samsung’s strength in designing and manufacturing a wide range of components which find their way into its own netbooks.
“As much as 75% of all components within our netbooks and notebooks are made by Samsung” recounts Emmanuele Silanesu, National Product and Marketing Manager of Samsung Australia IT Division. “We manufacture RAM, optical drives and hard drives, LCD screens, semiconductors, batteries – pretty much everything but the CPU and graphics chipset are made by Samsung.”
The netbooks and notebooks also come trundling out of Samsung’s own manufacturing line, Newton says. “We manufactures our own product – there are no other vendors in the world doing that, they all use Chinese manufacturers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we have total control over our quality and we can leverage our own R&D work.”
Newton cites this “end-to-end control” as being responsible for the product’s low failure rate. “We launched in Australia in May and sold 36,000 units through to December, and within that period we had only 27 real failures.”
David Flynn attended the Samsung Forum 2010 in Singapore as a guest of Samsung.