Samsung Expands Its Galaxy of Stars (Premium)

So, I’ve pre-ordered a Galaxy Note 10, partially because Samsung is offering a particularly good promotional trade-in rate on my Pixel 3XL. But it’s not just that: With this release, Samsung is dramatically expanding its Galaxy ecosystem, and it’s doing so in partnership with Microsoft. And I’m really curious to see where that goes.

As you may know, I spent yesterday traveling home from Amsterdam after a three-week home swap in nearby Hilversum. The flight itself was 8 hours, but the real-world door-to-door travel time was closer to 16 hours: We woke up at 5 am local time, left for the airport at 6 am, and got home in Pennsylvania, after yet another arduous drive from JFK, at about 4 pm ET. It was a long day.

It was also another bit of bad travel-related timing for me: Samsung held its Unpacked event the previous evening at 4 pm ET, or 10 pm Amsterdam time, where it unveiled the Galaxy Note 10, the Snapdragon 8cx-based Galaxy Book S laptop, and its expanded partnership with Microsoft. I recorded Windows Weekly just prior to the event, but with us getting up so early the next morning and needing to finish cleaning the home in which we were staying, I wasn’t able to watch Unpacked until I got home. So I did so, somewhat delirious from travel, last night.

And I have to say, I was somewhat mesmerized, despite the rampant presence of millennial influencers in the event, most of whom were surprisingly lucid and well-spoken. Samsung’s product launch events usually lurch between painfully embarrassing---you may recall one such event that was staged like a Broadway musical for some reason---and just plain boring. But this time around, I felt that Samsung got it right. Even the length---about an hour and 15 minutes---was just right. Something really clicked.

It helps that the products seem interesting, no small feat when you consider how gadget-jaded even the general public has become and how hard it is to advance the state of the art after years of market maturation. I will need to watch the event again to be sure---I had wanted to take notes but was too tired---but what I came away with was that Samsung was highlighting its interesting, Microsoft-like focus on productivity. Rather than adding features for feature's sake, a Samsung tradition, the company is instead being purposeful.

That was my takeaway, anyway. It could have been the sleep deprivation.

The event, as always, was emceed by Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh, a man who seems to have gotten the job because he’s so goofy and harmless looking. He’s also somewhat hard to understand, at least to my American ears. It reminds of the time I saw Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in the theater in the mid-1990s; it kind of takes a few minutes before I can understand what’s being said and then it suddenly starts to make sense.

But this teddy bear of a man runs the most powerful company in consumer electronics. And while that position has been artificially extended by...