Samsung Electronics Will Soon Release Galaxy Tab At Home

Sets its sights on selling 1 million units by year end

Samsung Electronics announced a plan to unveil on the domestic market its new tablet PC, the Galaxy Tab, at the media day event at the Samsung Electronics headquarters office in Seocho-dong, Seoul, on Nov. 4.
Shin Jong-kyun, president of Samsung Electronics’ mobile division, said his company could achieve their goal of selling more than 1 million units of the Galaxy Tab in the domestic market by the end of this year despite the delay of its launch, originally scheduled for late September or early October.
Samsung Electronics expects local customers to buy the Android operating system-based, 7-inch tablet PC, SHW-M180s from handset retailers starting Nov. 8, company officials said.
The Galaxy Tab, which has already made its debut on the European and other Asian markets, has gotten a good reception. Italy became the first country to put the Galaxy Tab on the market this past October, and the tablet PC has made a good start in the United Kingdom, Germany and other European countries. In particular, in the United Kingdom, the tablet PC was launched through the country’s biggest retailer in early November. The BBC Morning News gave prominent coverage to the tablet PC.
The Galaxy Tab made its debut in Indonesia on Oct. 30. A throng of customers trying to purchase the tablet PC formed a long queue, so initial stocks were sold out.
President Shin stressed that the Galaxy Tab would be “the New Cultural Code,” created as a result of his company’s continuous technological revolution for human beings. He dubbed the tablet PC as the super media device to experience rich and useful contents, including books, newspapers, magazines, movies, games and social network services (SNS) on the 7-inch screen in a perfect fashion.
The media day event attracted high expectations and concern from IT industry opinion leaders, reporters and tech-savvy early adopters. The occasion was telecast live via such social network sites as Facebook(www.facebook.com/SamsungTomorrow).
The Galaxy Tab, the first tablet certified by Google, can not only utilize diverse apps from the Android market, but also localized apps being made available from Samsung Electronics. In particular, the Galaxy Tab can provide Samsung Electronics’ differentiated contents and services in five categories: e-Reading, e-Learning, multimedia, utility and smart work. Galaxy Tab users can easily search a variety of data and contents from the “Readers Hub” that covers newspapers, magazines, books, comics, research reports and others in sector-by-sector classifications.
The tablet PC will bring about tremendous changes in the local education field as it offers videos of renowned private institute teachers’ classroom lectures and the ability to download secondary school textbooks on top of being fitted with diverse dictionaries.
It will provide diverse video services, including terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) and broadcasting outlets’ VOD services. In particular, Galaxy Tab users can enjoy moving videos without any translation.
The Galaxy Tab also covers Inavi 3D navigation, engineering calculators, automotive “black boxes,” flight tickets, train tickets and express bus reservations and other life-related contents and services.
SAMSUNG VS. APPLE - The intensifying competition between Samsung Electronics and Apple in the IT sector is likely to escalate into an all-out war as the two companies each simultaneously held ceremonies to release the Galaxy Tab and notebook MacBook Air on the domestic market.
The Samsung Electronics vs. Apple confrontation, which started with the domestic smartphone market, is now spilling into the notebook PC market. nw

Shin Jong-kyun, president of Samsung Electronics’ mobile division, unveils its new table PC, the Galaxy Tab, in Seoul on Nov. 4.