One of the biggest challenges of a top-to-bottom display is the home button, which has graced Samsung Galaxy phones since the get go. To that end, Samsung extended the display to the edge of the screen, and curved it to come up with something perfectly symmetrical, more a piece of modern art than something to call Grandma on. The basics design of modern smartphones was established, and breaking out of the mold required literally a new mold. The market was growing stale, and consumers were showing signs of fatigue. Leveraging that technology, we dreamed of the dream concept,” Kim explained. “When we planned the S6, we pushed forward the glass/metal design and flexible OLED tech. It feels like the culmination of years of design and engineering, what every other smartphone has been trying to do – and that’s because it is. Samsung calls the display an “infinity screen,” and it’s simply stunning, with deep, rich blacks, and crisp colors that stretch across nearly the entire front face of the phone. Seeing the phone (and that screen!) for the first time is arresting. We were here to talk about the Galaxy S8, of course, as well as the dream that led to its creation. The flight from New York to Seoul takes about 15 hours and carries you around the world. There’s broad boulevards, an open-air plaza called Central Park (with piped-in bird sounds!), and a giant underground shopping and living complex that holds two fitness centers, relaxation zones, a Samsung store, drugstores and retail chains - even a Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s as big as a prep school, and structured like one. Digital City is about two miles wide, spanning multiple office towers and residential buildings. We were in a conference room in Digital City, one of the consumer electronics giant’s office complexes in Suwon, South Korea, about half an hour south of Seoul. If I can deliver more meaningful innovation that’s the right way,” Koh told us. Even I’m learning from the Cupertino company. “The other four manufacturers I don’t want to say is competition, I’d say I’m monitoring and learning. And while Koh watches competitors like Apple, he’s less concerned with beating them and more interested in making the best products possible. The original dream – a flexible, touch-enabled screen that does away with bezels and buttons, literally pushing the edge of manufacturing as it removes edges and seams from the screen – came not from Kim but his boss (or maybe his boss’s boss?): DJ Koh, president of Samsung Mobile. There’s something else that’s been on Kim’s mind, as well, however: “We have a dream, to overcome Apple,” he said, with a grin. And It’s not 100 percent - it’s 90 percent of what we were aiming for.” It took for us 3 years to realize that concept. “When we finalized the S6 product planning, we dreamed of Dream. The basic concept of the S8 is from 2014,” Kim told us. “We dreamed up Project Dream over three years ago. The Galaxy S8 phone – codenamed “Dream” - has been under development for years, explained Gaeyoun Robert Kim, vice president on the product strategy team (check) for the new phone.

It may seem like smartphone makers churn out a new model every couple of weeks, but an incredible amount of planning goes into each one. What’s in a Name: The Dream of the screen The buzzing is cooling fans like those found inside desktop PCs the batteries are destined for the Samsung Galaxy S8, a make-or-break phone for the consumer electronics giant after “manufacturing issues” led to an unprecedented recall of the entire Note 7 fleet.Īnd watching over each rack, recording a test that will span whole days, is the cause of and solution to the problem: the very Note 7 devices that were recalled from the market.ĭigital Trends flew to Seoul, South Korea, in early March and crisscrossed the country to learn how Samsung designed the new phone, how it planned to continue pushing the envelope - and how it would ensure that nothing like the Note 7 fiasco ever happened again. Each shelf holds dozens of phone batteries - 6,000 in total. Cabinets fill the space, eight deep, row after row of them. In a gargantuan room a humming fills the air, like a hundred thousand bees flitting through the air.

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