Samsung Blogger Meet @ TGIF, Delhi

This past Saturday, saw Samsung did something which it does not do. Till now, Nokia was the only active company which ‘cultivates’ a league of bloggers, but it is not so. Samsung seems to have clearly declared ‘war’ on all fronts. Fonearena was also invited to the event at T.G.I.F, Vasant Kunj in Delhi. Since it was the first that Samsung was doing, we just had to go.

Going there seemed worthwhile too, as we got meet a whole lot of other bloggers and also the Samsung team of Ankur and Sarfaraz, both important men within the scheme of things at Samsung.

A demo of the Samsung Jet, aka the S8003 was given by Sarfaraz, Product Manager,India at Samsung. He said that Samsung wanted to create a ‘touch’ leadership globally. So whenever someone thought of a touch phone, Samsung would be the first that would spring to mind. There was also a contest for us bloggers, yes even we have contests! where the lucky winner to tweet the answers stood to win a brand new Jet.

The event was planned very nicely and was more of a fun session than a presentation or a launch.

Onward now to the Jet, which we will be reviewing soon on Fonearena. The Jet has a 800Mhz processor which is geared to give the best performance when it comes to applications, and priority is given to applications by the processor in such a way that core functions of the device are not sidetracked. Widgets, which Samsung is pushing for all it’s touch based devices through the TouchWIZ layer is found on the Jet too, and we were promised that widgets were being ‘Indianized’ and we will see India specific widgets very soon. Gesture control was also a big plus point for this phone, meaning that the phone can be controlled via gestures, this feature is not available, in the manner Samsung has, on a Nokia phone.

A lot of interesting bits of info also pointed to Samsung’s proposed direction. When quizzed about Ovi and Samsung App Store, Sarfaraz stated that ‘Nokia is two steps ahead of us, but we will have an answer in a year or so’. Does that mean an Ovi like service is being developed by Samsung too? your guess is as good as ours…

When Fonearena asked them about their Linux based OS and their many OSes that they have for their devices, Sarfaraz said, ‘yes it is a thought, which is why Linux!’ well at least it’s official now that Samsung is clearly out for Nokia’s throat. When the question about Social networking came up, Sarfaraz said that Orkut will be coming to Samsung devices real soon, this means that the API for Orkut will be officially accessible to Samsung.

During the meet we did get to learn that 2 new touchscreen devices will be launched in India soon, we can only guess it is the Pixon 12 Mega Pixel camera phone and the Corby, due to be launched at Mobile Asia this November.

Overall the event was really good and organized quite well by the Samsung team. With more such events being planned in the future, looks like Nokia’s marketing card, is no longer going to remain exclusive to them anymore. It’s definitely going to get exciting for the customer and us bloggers now.

We also got a one on one session with Ankur Sharma, and we will be publishing it soon.