Samsung emerges as Apple’s chief rival in innovation

For a technology with so much innovation, it’s amazing how few innovators are out there. Practically every mobile innovation in the last five years has come from Apple. It redefined the smartphone with the iPhone, and it defined the tablet with the iPad. It brought us AirPlay video streaming. It developed the gestures that are now fundamental to most touch devices. It created iCloud syncing. It created the basic visual language for mobile apps. It created the app store concept.

Of course, other companies have also innovated. Although much of Android is clearly based on iOS approaches, its voice recogniton is an area Google pioneered in mobile; its approach to notifications and over-the-air updates were both copied by Apple in iOS 5 as well. The defunct WebOS also introduced the widget notion now common in Android and some interesting approaches to multitasking navigation that RIM’s PlayBook OS uses. RIM’s PlayBook OS 2.0 has a fresh approach to social network integration.

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But the reality is that Apple has been the main driver of innovation.

Although I suspect that will remain the case for years to come, there’s a new innovator that might surprise you: Samsung. The South Korean electronics giant is known more for its work in display technology and for a strong focus on production methods for consumer electroncs gear it produces for itself and companies like Apple, though not so much for the kind of breakthroughs that you and I use directly.

But look at what Samsung has been doing over the last year, with a greater effort in recent months:

• Its Galaxy Tab 10.1 was the first plausible Android tablet, and I credit Samsung for keeping Android in that game. Yes, it’s a design clone of the iPad, so this is less a statement about innovation than commitment.
• The recent Galaxy Note smartphone/tablet hybrid has a very interesting pen, with a couple of apps that take groundbreaking advantage of it. The idea of pen computing is not new, but neither are many of the concepts that Apple has used in iPhones and iPads. The innovation lies in making a compelling user proposition for the technology, a feat Microsoft failed to accomplish for more than a decade with its Windows for Pen Computing efforts. Unfortunately, the UI for “optimized” apps on the 5-inch-screen Galaxy Note has many shortcomings.
• But kudos to Samsung for not giving up and instead bringing the technology to a 10-inch Galaxy Note tablet later this year, where the base Android UI is already well optimized for the screen size, requiring no UI mods.
• Samsung is also working on a smartphone called the Galaxy Beam (set for release this year) with a built-in pico projector; that concept should be a hit among salespeople and marketers, who practically live on their smartphones and tablets when on the road. The concept has been floating around for years, but Samsung may be the one to make it real.
• Drawing from its display-technology roots, Samsung promises to deliver smartphones with flexible screens this year, and tablets after. I’m not creative enough to figure out what value a curved screen would add to a smartphone or tablet (a rollup device?), but I’m eager to see what Samsung has in mind.

As I noted, Samsung did a poor UI design job with the Galaxy Note — a common disappointment among most electronics manufacturers. Unlike Apple, Samsung may maintain its innovation focus on the hardware end. If so, that’s just peachy.

The real question is whether Samsung can sustain a commitment to innovation, where failure is part of the price to be paid and there’s a risk of lacking disciplined vision (like Apple has) and instead throwing out one disconnected fantasy after the other (like Microsoft has in its Windows and Office UIs).

I’ve seen tech giants come and go when it comes to innovation. Acer, Motorola, and Sony are three prime examples of companies that talked innovation, but after no quick victories, retreated to making pretty cases, despite delivering on a couple of counts (the Sony Walkman and Motorola StarTac and Razr). Dell and Hewlett-Packard have also largely moved into “pretty case” mode, but that’s because they’ve largely stopped caring about consumer products.

HTC was an early innovator in the Android market — its Droid Eris had a nice UI that overcame the then-curent Android’s poor interface. But HTC soon stalled, ceding the Android leadership to Google and, later, to Samsung and Motorola Mobility. HTC is trying again this year with a virtualized smartphone concept, but who knows how long that effort will last.

I hope Samsung doesn’t follow a similar pattern. Apple doesn’t have all the answers, and its solutions don’t work for everyone. Plus, the notion of an Apple innovation monopoly is as scary as any monopoly.

It helps that Samsung is big and ambitious. The fact that Samsung produces Android, Windows Phone, and Bada smartphones gives it multiple platforms for experimentation — and spread the costs of innovation. It helps that before the iPhone era, Samsung’s home base of South Korea was for many years one of the hotbeds of mobile innovation. It’d be great to see it become one again.

This article, “Samsung emerges as Apple’s chief rival in innovation,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.