Korean firms vying for tech leadership

Samsung unveils Tizen-powered smart watch at MWC

By Choi Kyong-ae

BARCELONA ― Korean handset and telecom companies are keen on rising to the pinnacle of technological innovation in mobile devices and services at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which opened last week in Barcelona.

Samsung Gear 2

Samsung Electronics attracted a great deal of attention after it unveiled the Samsung Gear 2, the successor to the Galaxy Gear wearable smart watch. Samsung Gear 2 is the first wearable gadget that runs on Samsung’s mobile operating system, called Tizen.

Last September in Berlin, it unveiled the wristwatch-like Galaxy Gear which came with the Galaxy Note 3, the latest version of its hybrid phone-tablet.

“We will continue to offer newer values to our customers by developing innovative wearable devices to allow them to enjoy the ‘smart freedom.’ We will also cement our lead in the mobile devices market,” Shin Jong-kyun, president and CEO of Samsung’s IT and Mobile Communications Division, said in a statement.

The company also plans to expand the connection of the Tizen-powered Samsung Gear to automobiles and home appliances like TVs, according to a recent statement it released. Samsung is the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones by shipments.

The Samsung Gear will go on sale from April in more than 150 countries, the statement said. But analysts say the Gear product won’t likely be a major booster to Samsung’s bottom line as it is still regarded by many as a bundle item attached to a major product.

Samsung came up with the smart watch powered by its open-source Tizen platform at the MWC after a recent major setback in its efforts to develop the platform to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in the smartphone market. All Samsung smartphones currently run on Android.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest telecommunications company by sales, shelved its plan to release its first Tizen smartphone in January.

It also plans to unveil the Galaxy S5, the successor of the Galaxy S4 smartphone on Feb. 25 at the MWC. How the new flagship smartphone is taken by the market will be key for Samsung’s future earnings growth, analysts say. Samsung earns nearly 70 percent of its operating profit from mobile phones and telecom equipment.

LG Electronics, a smaller rival of Samsung, is betting big on the success of the technology called “Knock Code” which allows users to unlock their phones with two to eight taps on the screen, whether the display is turned on or off.

On Feb. 12, the company announced its LG G Pro 2, the first smartphone with the Knock Code function, in Korea ahead of the MWC show which is scheduled to run through Feb. 27 in Barcelona. The 4G-equipped phone also came with a bigger 5.9-inch screen, Android 4.4 KitKat and more powerful speakers.

“We will take the lead in offering innovative UX (user experience) functions in our mobile devices,” LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company President and CEO Park Jong-seok said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Korea’s three major mobile carriers _ SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus _ competed with each other to showcase next-generation Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technologies for speedier mobile services.

SK Telecom tripled the standard LTE-A speed of 150Mbps in one year by utilizing its new technology called 3band LTE-Advanced. It relies on aggregating different frequency bands in order to triple the throughput and achieve the record 450Mbps downlink speed.

The carrier demonstrated the latest LTE-A technology at the MWC, Monday. If the technology is commercialized, it will take only 15 seconds to download an 800 megabit movie.

KT and LG Uplus also showcased their carrier aggregation technology. Carrier aggregation is the first step in LTE-A commercialization, offering increased user data rates for all users in the cell.

Away from a saturated domestic market, the carriers are now targeting to enter overseas markets with their advanced technologies for mobile services.