hankyoreh

By Koo Bon-kwon, Senior Staff Writer　

Google’s close relationship with Samsung Electronics has become closer yet.

On May 10, Google gave Galaxy Tab 10.1s to all 5,500 participants at its I/O developers’ conference in San Francisco. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a tablet PC that runs Google’s Honeycomb tablet operating system (OS). The fact that Google provided the device to participants at the developers’ conference reaffirms its status as Google’s reference product. Because the Android OS is open source, a compatibility problem known as “fragmentation” occurs each time a company somewhere in the world releases a product that uses it. In response, Google is using a reference product to effectively present developers with standards.

On May 11, when announcing Google’s new cloud-based Chrome PC OS, company CEO Larry Page introduced Samsung Electronics’ Chromebook laptop computer as his model. Google first revealed its “special relationship” to Samsung Electronics at the end of last year, when it introduced its Nexus S reference phone, which uses Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), by way of Samsung Electronics.

The close relationship between the two companies is not merely an alliance designed to counter Apple: it is also related to each firm’s individual strategy. Samsung Electronics is pursuing a multi-platform strategy of devoting efforts not only to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 but also to its own Bada OS. Google, which created the open source Android platform that can be used by anyone, is promoting innovation by cranking up competition between various device manufacturers. 　　

“Since the Nexus S, Samsung has been using its own chipsets while quickly releasing successor Android models and quickly updating them,” said an official at a Korean smartphone company that has worked closely with Google. “This is hard to do without monitoring internal sources related to Android: it is thus understood that Google has kept allowing Samsung access to its internal server since the Nexus S came out.”

The industry view is that Samsung Electronics enjoyed a high degree of trust from Google in the processes of obtaining Google recognition for the Galaxy Tab and developing the Nexus S, and that this in turn led to an increase in sales for Samsung.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]