In a welcome break from hoofing it around the show floor, I sat down with Seungsoo Park, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Samsung's Digital AV Division. Park handles MP3 players, home theater, Blu-ray, and camcorders; here's a summary of what he had to say.
Samsung has a 50 percent MP3 player marketshare in South Korea, where Apple has a 5 percent share. In America, the situation is reversed.
Two to three years ago, Samsung was the first MP3 player manufacturer to adopt Bluetooth, but pairing was too difficult, resulting in many customer returns. Now, Bluetooth is a major trend, and "we'll keep marching for that."
When I asked about Kleer and other wireless technologies, he said the company is experimenting with new wireless protocols, but that it's committed to Bluetooth for the time being -- partially because it's cost-effective. The company integrated Bluetooth into its entire 2008 line of home theater receivers, including some speakers. However, Bluetooth isn't fast enough for video or surround sound audio.
Samsung's new approach to speakers is to include three drivers in a horizontal row, with the center speaker handling the mid-range frequencies of the human voice. (The YA-BS900 unit provides a nice experience if you've been listening to music on your cellphone or Bluetooth-capable MP3 player. A motion detector on the front of the unit can tell when you're entering the room; at that point, the audio stops playing through your headphones, and starts streaming through the speakers. Should your phone ring, the speaker mutes, and resumes when the call's over.)
If you have Samsung speakers set up in multiple rooms, you can stream music from the phone or MP3 player in your pocket. Using Bluetooth's proximity protocol, one speaker switches off when you get closer to another, which turns on seamlessly.
With the company's latest MP3 players, you can sync your phone's contact list onto your MP3 player and make calls directly from the player, once it's paired with your phone. This involves using the microphone on the MP3 player, so you can still use it if you upgrade your headphones.
Flash is the future of portable storage for MP3 players and even HD camcorders. As the density goes up, the price goes down.
Samsung believes in offering free firmware upgrades to add new features and better performance. When the company said it could increase the battery life of one of its players using only a firmware upgrade, there was a "big debate" on the company's message board, since some users were skeptical that firmware could improve battery life. But sure enough, the firmware upgrade caused the devices to manage power more efficiently.
In Korea, Samsung's MP3 players offer Korean-to-English dictionaries. In this country, they're working on French- and Spanish-to-English. They'll also load current news using a feed that syncs from Samsung's website onto the player while it's docked.
The 16:9 ratio on Samsung's YP-P2 meant that CinemaNow needed to format its videos especially for Samsung. This means you don't have to do any transcoding in order to load the videos onto the device.
Samsung is members of both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD initiatives. (LG is the only other major CE company that belongs to both). In order to simplify things for consumers, Samsung sells players that handle both high-def video formats, despite Warner's decision to go exclusively with Blu-ray. He says the additional cost required to provide this dual functionality is minimal. When I remarked that the more open approach usually wins, he said, "Samsung has always a very open approach... (joking) it's for the peace of all mankind!"
Technology sometimes exists for its own sake. This is wrong; technology should work for people.
Now that high-definition video formats exist, the next step is interactivity. In Blu-ray, this is done with Javascript; in HD-DVD, it's XML. In the movie Transformer, this lets you skin the menu and see where each seen took place on a map, and in 2 Fast 2 Furious, it meant you could see how much each car accident would cost in repairs. Commerce, such as being able to buy the same shirt as James Bond, will also be possible in this way.
