My meeting with Samsung, report back on the i8910

I had a meet­ing with Sam­sung Tech­ni­cal Man­ager Chris. The meet­ing lasted a total of 4 hours — that’s right 4 hours and we dis­cussed every­thing in the report, point by point.

Update: I’ve made a few changes as sug­gested by Sam­sung to clar­ify some of the points.

First off I have to say I was thor­oughly impressed. The meet­ing left me with a whole dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on things. I’ll go point by point dis­cussing each of the points men­tioned in the report and Samsung’s response, so here goes!

Change log for updates: This is avail­able from Sam­sung on all updates. You can get in touch with Sam­sung for the change logs.Usually there are hun­dreds of changes, most too tech­ni­cal for the aver­age Joe to under­stand. They make an effort to high­light the impor­tant things mostly to do with the UI (user inter­face) because these affect how users inter­act with the phone.

Updates for all regions:  Sam­sung is con­tin­u­ously mak­ing updates. So far, there have been heaps of updates devel­oped for the i8910. Only about 4 (a really small frac­tion) have been released so far. Sam­sung has an extremely strict qual­ity assur­ance team that has to go through each and every detail with great care. The amount detail in each report for each update is stag­ger­ing. They check every­thing from spellings to audio qual­ity, to video qual­ity and beyond.

(Updated) Thing is, updates are region/supplier/carrier spe­cific, even for generic firmware. In order for an update to be pushed in your par­tic­u­lar region, Sam­sung in that par­tic­u­lar region has to know that you want an update. If some­one in the UK for instance com­plains about a cer­tain thing and an update is avail­able, the update is pulled or requested to resolve the issues for the UK only. If Sam­sung HQ reck­ons the update is nec­es­sary for all regions, they inform each of the sub­sidiaries in all regions. Each will then dis­cuss with oper­a­tors and HQ to decide whether to apply it or not. If you have any prob­lems with your device, con­tact Sam­sung in your region so they look into it.

Over The Air updates (OTA): Sup­ported but only for small patches. We’ve only had big updates so we haven’t seen any of these. It also has to do with the car­rier; whether they can sup­port updates over the air and they can han­dle the amount of data required. i8910 firmware typ­i­cally occu­pies a lot of mem­ory. Even over WiFi  it would take a long time to trans­fer that much data.

User Data Preser­va­tion: For small updates it’s already there. For the large updates like the ones we get, back­ing up all the data then trans­fer­ring it back means that the update can take ages. It’s just not prac­ti­cal, so back up all your data before each update and restore it later.

Cam­era prob­lems: At the time when the i8910 was released, the cam­era hard­ware included was the lat­est and the best. Sam­sung is aware of the prob­lem with HD frame-rate but says these are the same issues across the board. The same prob­lems can be repli­cated with other devices.

(Updated) Auto-focus in video is some­thing they are look­ing in to. There wasn’t enough demand for this fea­ture so they excluded it but it is pos­si­ble. Even if it is applied, the qual­ity of the video remains pretty much the same so it’s no use.

The set­tings for the cam­era were the opti­mum set­tings decided on for the i8910. They are look­ing into the n86 set­tings dis­cussed in the report.

The fea­ture to acti­vate the cam­era in video mode has been passed on to prod­uct design for consideration.

Web browser: The prob­lems with the web browser were noted and you should be get­ting a fixed web browser in the next update.

Slow oper­a­tion: They are work­ing on new methods(algorithms) for the oper­a­tion of the phone. The old meth­ods used were OK at the time when the phone was in devel­op­ment but they are  work­ing on new tech­niques to keep up with the com­pe­ti­tion. You should see improved per­for­mance in the upcom­ing update and future updates.

Java(Updated): Java can not be updated. In fact, the process is so com­plex and time con­sum­ing it would be eas­ier to release a whole new device.

Space on C: drive: The solu­tion is just to install every­thing on mass stor­age, they can’t free up any more with­out compromising.

Cus­tomiza­tion: Things like the options on the bot­tom row and the swipe pro­grams are nom­i­nated with sev­eral fac­tors to con­sider. A large fac­tor is the car­ri­ers, each part of the UI is decided upon by the car­rier and approved for par­tic­u­lar regions. Ease of use and inno­v­a­tive or dis­tinc­tive fea­tures are also favored over prac­ti­cal­ity. So in a nu shell, they may con­sider some cus­tomiza­tion options but it’s not likely to change.

Themes: Fevves sug­gested Car­bide UI plu­gin and full themes spec­i­fi­ca­tion. Sam­sung responded that Car­bide is third party soft­ware so they can’t guar­an­tee com­pat­i­bil­ity. Also, there are heaps of com­pat­i­ble themes avail­able in the Sam­sung Fun Club. Even though, Chris men­tioned that they might make a pro­gram that’s spe­cific to the i8910 that allows users to make com­pat­i­ble themes. They might, time will tell.

Lack of Sup­port: Pretty much out of Samsung’s hands. The phone isn’t that pop­u­lar so third party devel­op­ers aren’t really attracted to it. Sam­sung admits that it’s really unfor­tu­nate and they’ll try to do what they can.

Wid­gets: They are region spe­cific. Some regions have more than oth­ers. They are con­tin­u­ing to work on more widgets.

Kinetic Scrolling: Com­ing in the next update.

Email Con­fig­u­ra­tion: Not com­ing, too many changes need to be made. At the time of release the fea­ture wasn’t as common.

FM Transmitter(Updated): It’s there! But it was not devel­oped for the phone. It was con­sid­ered in early prod­uct plan­ning phase, how­ever, due to strict reg­u­la­tions in some regions as Sam­sung was tar­get­ing global launch, it was removed. Sam­sung has low end hand­sets which have FM Trans­mit­ting, but those prod­uct are devel­oped to sup­port FM Trans­mit­ting. FM trans­mit­ting was never adver­tised by Samsung.

Screen saver: Bat­tery drain, most man­u­fac­tures choose not to include any screen savers for this reason.

Phys­i­cal music controls(via vol­ume rocker)(Updated): Sam­sung appre­ci­ates this sug­ges­tion and they will review this con­cept and apply it for future models.

VoIP: Con­flicts with a lot of car­ri­ers. There are many free third party apps like Fring that have this feature.

Front cam­era access(Updated): Peo­ple rarely use this fea­ture out­side of video calls. None of Samsung’s recent mod­els sup­port this as the qual­ity is not great.

Call recording(Updated): i8910 device spec­i­fi­ca­tion doesn’t include it.

Time-lapse video: They have for­warded this to the devel­op­ment team. They are con­sid­er­ing it.

Sup­port of other lan­guages: Sam­sung doesn’t have enough resources to sup­port as many lan­guages as they would like to. As they expand more, sup­port for more lan­guages will continue.

WMV/WMA sup­port: The for­mats are quite pop­u­lar but they are part of the the few that are not sup­ported. Sam­sung is not promis­ing any future sup­port of these formats.

Video editor(Updated): It was there ini­tially in pre-release firmware but due to time to mar­ket, fail­ure rate and not being a must have, it was removed. You can only do so such on a mobile phone, video edit­ing requires quite a lot of pro­cess­ing power. They didn’t feel the fea­ture did jus­tice to the i8910

Por­trait QWERTY: It was ini­tially included but feed­back from early mod­els showed there were too many com­plaints. In the end they had to scrape it off.

Voice Com­mands: Noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to imple­ment with­out prob­lems. There are many accents and a lot of work has to been done devel­op­ing recog­ni­tion solu­tions for each region. Ffor this rea­son, they excluded it from design phase.

Hand­writ­ing Training(upadted): Hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion in the i8910 is a fea­ture that’s so well devel­oped that there is no need for a train­ing pro­gram. Train­ing soft­ware was pop­u­lar in the early days when the tech­nol­ogy was still pre­ma­ture. Now it’s not necessary.

VPN (updated): i8910 is not designed for busi­ness port­fo­lio, unfor­tu­nately VPN is not supported.

Torch function(Updated): Sam­sung said that this fea­ture couldn’t be accom­mo­dated from the design level. Sam­sung does have many devices which sup­port torch func­tion. For high end devices that have more func­tions, it’s expected that a torch will con­sume a lot of bat­tery power so it wouldn’t be an ideal fea­ture. It’s expected and more com­mon in lower end mod­els and gen­er­ally not found in smart phones. It would be very ideal to fully pack all func­tion­al­ity into a sin­gle device, but it’s not practical.

Threaded SMS: They said it’s unfor­tu­nate this fea­ture was not avail­able when i8910 was devel­oped. Again it would take a lot to develop some­thing like that. We have to rely on the Free-iSMS forever!

Kies: The Kies Appli­ca­tion at Sam­sung Apps web­site is not made for Symbian.

Alter­na­tive Oper­at­ing Sys­tems: It is pos­si­ble to have these on the device. Prob­lem is that the work required to do some­thing like that is equiv­a­lent to devel­op­ing a new prod­uct all together. So no, it’s not happening.

Ok, that’s it. If I left out any­thing please feel free to ask, the meet­ing was very long and I learnt a lot of things. I must say kudos to Mr Chris Kim for hav­ing the patience to lis­ten and address every sin­gle issue on the report. I met sev­eral other Sam­sung employ­ees there and the whole expe­ri­ence was sim­ply awe­some. Thank you.

As you might know my i8910 is dead. I should have been upgraded to the lat­est firmware dated 29 Decem­ber 2009 today. This is the update that will be pushed to every­one very soon, its already there but it’s prob­a­bly await­ing approval. I was given a loaner so I can try repro­duce some of the issues and test drive the new firmware. I haven’t tested it too much but Kinetic scrolling works like a charm.

I now have a deep respect for Sam­sung and their oper­a­tions. Their approval/ qual­ity assess­ment sys­tem may be really strict but that’s why their prod­ucts are really good and gen­er­ally bug free. I’ll update you on more progress.

(Update) Video of what to expect in the new update firmware update

An impor­tant point to note is that Sam­sung is divided into regions then coun­tries and car­ri­ers. I’m based in New Zealand where the i8910 wasn’t even launched. It’s a lot that Sam­sung even con­sid­ered what I had to say. If you have issues with your device, make an effort to at least point Sam­sung in your region/carrier to the report/petition and indi­cate that you want an update with such and such fea­tures in case they are not aware. Updates won’t just come by magic for your region if no one com­plains. Approach Sam­sung, they won’t bite.

Cheers Anphase.