Galaxy Trilogy
PENDLETON’S MARKETING TEAM WAS at work translating the next five-
hundred-page manual of engineering mumbo jumbo for the follow-up
phone from Samsung: the Galaxy S III, due out in May 2012.
Though they hadn’t seen the phone, they sensed this one was different.
Samsung had been following its path of incremental innovation, making
small adjustments and adding new features to the first two models, and they
were making a big difference.
During the eighteen-month development process for the new phone,
Samsung’s engineers were under a secret lockdown. They were allowed to
carry three prototypes around the building in boxes to meet with their
colleagues, but they were unable to show their colleagues a picture. They
had to describe the phone as best they could in project meetings.
“To be honest, it was quite tiring and frustrating,” said senior engineer
Lee Byoung-sun.
The South Korean engineers homed in on the social media–like features
of the phone. They were novel in terms of their ability to let people share
multimedia instantly. The engineers decided to develop the Galaxy S III’s
ability to connect to a television and to automatically share content with
friends when tapped against another phone—sharing files instantly. They
also documented several hardware firsts or near firsts: two gigabytes of
RAM, a superior camera, a bigger display, and one of the highest-definition
smartphone screens available on the market, the Super AMOLED, designed
in-house by Samsung. But the U.S. marketing team’s strategy was to build a
phone that would transcend the individual features, to create a brand that
customers would remember.
“A lot of those features didn’t catch on,” according to one of Todd’s