Samsung goes for the yet-to-materialise Indian tablet market

After launching a high-decibel campaign for its iPad-rival — the Galaxy Tab — Samsung India is in no mood to let up on the yet-to-materialise tablet market in India.

Dipesh Shah, head of India R&D, said the company will unveil “a few more” tablet models in the first half of the year, possibly including one that takes direct aim at the 10-inch tablet from Apple.

Shah, who heads the 3,000 strong research and development team in India, did not rule out a 10-inch version of the iPad, pointing out that there is already a large amount of content tailored for the Apple iPad.

“We will look at it since there is a lot of content already optimised for a 10-inch screen,” he said, adding that Samsung will soon launch its own music download service.

Shah’s India R&D unit — the largest outside Korea — is primarily focused on creating software that goes into Samsung’s products.

Among the Indian contributions are the web-browser on the Bada platform, the emerging 4G standards, high definition video-recording, voice-over-internet and of course, local language customisations.

Other rivals, such as Nokia and Apple, have already launched their own music and application services in an attempt to entice customers to purchase their devices. It will also distribute electronic versions of newspapers, books and magazines to its Galaxy Tab customers.

Shah said the Korean firm has already launched a movie service aimed at its Galaxy Tab customers. He said in markets like the US, the operators themselves have their own content services, but in India, operators have not been very successful at addressing the content market. “In such markets, Samsung will provide the content,” he said.

Samsung is positioning its tablets as ‘internet content consumption platform’, instead of trying to appeal to the netbook customer. “A netbook will appeal to someone like an enterprise customer. But tablets are targeted at people who want to consume media, such as watching web video,” he said.

Tablets will continue to be priced in the Rs 30,000 range - roughly twice the price of an average netbook — due to the extra components that go into them, Shah said.

Unlike a netbook, a tablet comes with its own 3G or Wimax connection and a sensitive touch-screen. The need for excellent video playback and full-day battery life also require tablet makers to use low-power consumption ARM-based chips instead of the traditional computer chips from Intel or AMD which require larger batteries.

Shah said the company will continue to build its proprietary Bada software platform, even as it continues to chug out models based on Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Bada has been developed to bring smartphone-like capability to even low-end models.

Instead of slowing down on a mainstream 500 megahertz processor, Bada can run smoothly even on an entry-level 300 Mhz processor and works with just one, instead of two, main processor.

“Our vision is to massify the smartphone market and Bada is crucial to that,” he said. Samsung had faced flak for fragmenting the already cluttered smartphone market by introducing its own operating system, Bada, five months ago.