Samsung’s Divisions Will Be Their Downfall in the Smartphone Arena

Sam­sung is hav­ing a lot of suc­cess with lower-end mobile phones. Accord­ing to reports, they sold almost 69 mil­lion units in the fourth quar­ter of 2009. When it comes to smart­phones though, their pres­ence is not so sig­nif­i­cant. The chart below shows mar­ket growth for smart­phone mak­ers. Of the man­u­fac­tur­ers listed in this chart below, Sam­sung per­formed the poor­est. The rea­son for this is fairly obvi­ous to me, Sam­sung is not pre­pared for prime time.

Smart­phone Mar­ket Share

Their dif­fer­ent divi­sions bring down poten­tially awe­some devices before they’ve fully had their chance.

Sam­sung Region/Language Divisions

The chart above shows the dif­fer­ent Regions/Language divi­sions in Sam­sung firmware across sev­eral devices includ­ing mobile phones.

Sam­sung Network/Carrier Divisions

The chart above shows Samsung’s codes for dif­fer­ent networks/carriers. All these dif­fer­ent networks/carriers/regions/countries have dif­fer­ent ver­sions of firmware for each device. Each have dif­fer­ent approval sys­tems, dif­fer­ent teams spread across dif­fer­ent coun­tries and car­ri­ers. Often, the teams in some regions/carriers are com­pletely unaware of devel­op­ments made in other regions; that’s the extent of how bad the sit­u­a­tion is.

As I was updat­ing my 3year old iPod Touch with the new firmware a few days back, it dawned on me. The firmware updates for Apple are the same across the dif­fer­ent devices and they are pub­lished at the same time in all the regions. The same can not be said for Sam­sung. You may argue that Sam­sung has far more devices, they are on more plat­forms, in dif­fer­ent indus­tries etc. but at the end of the day, it comes down to whether or not they are deliv­er­ing to the con­sumer. If they can’t han­dle the load like their com­peti­tors can for those rea­sons, they should prob­a­bly opt out of this industry.

For dumb-phones, wash­ing machines, dish-washers etc, Samsung’s approach works just fine. Dumb-phones for instance rarely need updates and the peo­ple who use dumb-phones usu­ally don’t expect or even look for firmware updates any­way. The smart­phone arena is a whole dif­fer­ent ball game. Peo­ple who use smart­phones are nor­mally tech savvy, they know their way around tech­nol­ogy, they fol­low trends and devel­op­ments in tech­nol­ogy and they always want to be on the cut­ting edge. When a com­pany makes a smart­phone, it should be a com­mit­ment. A com­mit­ment to keep dri­ving inno­va­tion and keep sup­port­ing it and updat­ing it as new trends and new needs arise. It’s not enough to just release smart­phones then just sit back and watch them fly off the shelf.

The mas­sive divi­sions in Sam­sung are not ideal for smart­phones. In this regard, Sam­sung is the worst com­pany to buy a smart­phone from if you wish to get updates. They may make updates for their smart­phones as dis­cussed in my meet­ing with them but these updates may never actu­ally get to any­one as in the case with the Sam­sung i8510. For this device, the last offi­cial update was released to the pub­lic in March 2009 yet the last update I’m aware of was released in Novem­ber 2009. That means there were peo­ple work­ing on who-knows-what, fix­ing bugs and such for more than 8 months for absolutely noth­ing? The divi­sion sys­tem is ridicu­lous. To date, sev­eral regions have not received any offi­cial updates at all. For instance; Aus­tralia, Nether­lands, Poland, India and Croa­tia barely got any updates if at all. What’s the point of invest­ing in a Sam­sung smart­phone if Sam­sung has more prongs than they can deal with. If they are inca­pable of prop­erly sup­port­ing, updat­ing, devel­op­ing and per­fect­ing their devices for all regions, then they are not worth anyone’s time.

The first thing that I was asked when approach­ing Sam­sung rep­re­sen­ta­tives was “which region are you from?”. That’s the sin­gle most impor­tant ques­tion to them because of the divi­sions. Even when I wanted to sub­mit my report, divi­sions were a prob­lem. The issues dis­cussed were gen­er­ated as a joint effort, input came from i8910 users from all over the world but they wanted to address me alone, in my region.

This is not to say that other com­pa­nies like Apple, Nokia and HTC for exam­ple don’t have these regional/carrier divi­sions. It’s the extent to which these divi­sions affect the users of Sam­sung phones. If an update for the UK comes today, there’s no guar­an­tee that an update will ever come for India. That’s not the case with other smart­phone man­u­fac­tures. Users of smart­phones from other mak­ers don’t have to wait for updates that will never come in a region where the phone was offi­cially launched.

It is because of these divi­sions that no one from Sam­sung offi­cially responded to the report/petition. No region wants to take the load, they all think it’s some other region’s respon­si­bil­ity. The tech­ni­cal man­ager I spoke to knows every­thing there is to know (which is why we had the meet­ing), but he was not giv­ing an offi­cial response. He too is wait­ing for Sam­sung HQ to for­mally respond. I’ve added a sig­na­ture counter for the peti­tion on the side­bar so we can eas­ily track the num­ber which is slowly approach­ing 4000 signatures.

It’s all about updates to keep up with the com­pe­ti­tion in the smart­phone arena. If a smart­phone man­u­fac­turer is unable to effec­tively deliver updates in a timely man­ner, it will lose the game to those who can.