hankyoreh

By Lee Hyung-suk, staff reporter

A 50-meter, four-lane swimming pool built to international competition standards. Two squash courts. A 9-meter-tall rock-climbing practice wall. A state-of-the-art health club.

This facility, which looks at first glance like an elite training site for athletes, is actually the gym on the second basement level of R5, Samsung Electronics’ new smartphone research institute. The idea is that researchers who are tired from their smartphone research can use the facilities to exercise and relax. It’s also symbolic of the huge efforts the company is making with its smartphone development, which accounts for most of its profits - 74% of operating profits in the first quarter of this year.

R5 recently finished its two-year, six-month construction process and went into official operation. It’s the fifth general research facility set up by the company in its Digital City research complex in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province and it’s being used by 10,000 cell phone R&D workers who had previously been scattered all around the country. The twin towers have 27 stories above ground and five below, with a floor area of 308,980 square meters - now packed with all of the Samsung’s R&D know-how.

The mobile sound laboratory showed the level of Samsung’s commitment of smartphone development. With more than ten international standard soundproof rooms, it is used not only to test the sound quality of devices, but also to adjust sounds to the noise environments of different countries around the world.

“In India, a lot of people put their smartphone in their shirt pocket and talk on speakerphone while riding a motorbike,” senior researcher Kim Gyeong-yeok explained on June 26. “For that kind of setting, you need features that detect ambient noise and automatically adjust the sound levels.”

R5 also has an electromagnetic compatibility lab (EMC), a Bluetooth/WiFi lab, an antenna lab, and various other laboratories for advanced technology, which makes it possible to develop and test all in one place.

On June 27, the Samsung Innovation Forum is being opened to the public. Reporters were also invited to take a look. The forum is a setting where recent products are displayed side by side with globally uncompetitive items from the time of the company’s 1993 “new management declaration” - giving a glimpse of how much innovation has taken place since then. At the entrance of the forum, visitors can see what prompted the declaration in the first place: televisions that gathered dust in an LA appliance store, washing machines with doors that didn’t close properly (each one had to be pared down with a box cutter), and wireless phones whose poor quality led to 150,000 of them being torched.

Members of the public who wish to visit can apply through the exhibit‘s home page.

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