Three Areas Samsung Will Focus On To Avoid Smartphone Complacency - Forbes

Samsung Galaxy R (Wikipedia)

Congratulations Samsung, you made it. Top of the heap, number one, head honcho, the big man in the room, the all conquering mobile phone manufacturer. The King that was Nokia is no more, Samsung are now the number one mobile phone manufacturer on the planet.

That was the easy bit. Now they need to stay there, which is a different challenge altogether, and one that many companies have had to face up to before. One slip up in strategy and planning can start a chain reaction that could be masked by the market until the cliff face is reached. Just ask Nokia.

Samsung have many things to be careful of over the next few years, but there are three that cover the biggest areas of risk and opportunity.

The first is their mobile phone operating system. Right now they are the arguably the lead Android handset manufacturer, and their Galaxy range of smartphones and tablets are reliant on Google's OS. Of course the future of Android is not especially clear in the medium to long term. Samsung have already been caught out by being part of a collective group of manufacturers within a mobile phone ecosystem (Symbian), so they are well aware of the dangers of one party suddenly gaining more power and influence over the other partners.

Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility must play heavily on Samsung's mind. For all the talk of Chinese walls and no undue influence, the idea of Google swinging behind the Motorola team for the hero devices would be an unsettling one.

Samsung do have alternatives, including their own Bada OS (and they'll be taking notes from Amazon's forking of the code-base for the Kindle Fire), but the question of how much of their success is down to their own hardware as opposed to Google's software is intriguing. They need to have options to reduce their exposure to a mythically weak Android OS in the future.

The smartphone world is turning into a specification war, with many customers walking into stores only interested in having the phone with "the biggest number", be it the speed or number of processors, the megapixels on the camera sensor, or the on board memory storage. While there is a place for this, it means that any manufacturer can simply chuck components on a board and out-gun the latest Samsung device. All these higher specced hardware units will need a correspondingly higher bill of materials, and the battery power to get them through a full day of work, and that means investment, research and staying on top of the latest technologies to keep the costs down as much as possible. With their scale, Samsung have the opportunity to address this better than other companies.

They also need to maintain the hunger to stay on top of every development, and constantly look for innovations outside the company, while encouraging every drop of creativity from their internal teams and allow them to take risks.

I can already see complacency from Samsung's design department. Alongside Android, Samsung have a number of Windows Phone devices, and when you lay out the portfolio the similarity between the 'Galaxy/Android' and 'Focus/Windows Phone' devices is spooky. While there's nothing wrong with using the same chassis around a different engine, it makes the whole Windows Phone exercise feel like covering bases, and the Android devices feel a little less 'special'.

There is a lot that can be done with design and right now that's Samsung's weak spot. The hero phones of 2012 and beyond need to be more than basic slabs of touch screen surrounded by dark plastic. Let's see what the new Galaxy looks like, and see if it also becomes the design of Samsungs Windows 8 Phone, shall we?

Samsung have a huge amount of momentum behind them, and they're going to be a leading player in the smartphone world over the next few years. But they need to keep pushing hard to stay in the number one slot. How they address the choices of operating systems, hardware, and design, will be key to their continued success.