SAN JOSE, California — Samsung is one of several manufacturers betting that consumers want their gadgets to look like the models in fashion magazines: Skinny, glossy and colorful.
“Every few years there’s a new buzzword,” says Scott Birnbaum, vice president of Samsung’s LCD business. “First, everything was neat, then everything was cool, now everything is thin.”
Slim profiles are already a big factor in mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players, where small size has a definite practical advantage. This year, Samsung, LG, Lenovo and other manufacturers are bringing the trend to larger appliances, like TVs and computers.
Samsung says it is working on reducing the profile of every component it produces–from processors to displays and memory–while upping the ante on performance.
Samsung’s latest TVs are a third of an inch thick. The company is working to shrink them further by building the drivers for the TVs directly into the glass cells rather than putting them on the bezel that surrounds, the display, says Birnbaum.
“We think TVs are going to become a liquid crystal piece of art that hangs on the walls of your house,” he says.
The company showed off some of the technologies behind its new thin products at a press event here on Wednesday.
“Samsung plays in so many different areas of the electronics business from hard drives to flash and memory,” says Rhoda Alexander, an analyst for iSuppli, a market research firm. “So when they try to make everything thin they can layer it all better than anyone else.”
Take Samsung’s latest LED-backlit TVs, which Samsung promises will get up to 40 percent skinnier in the next two years.
“We can do this because we are reducing the number of LED bars that go on the sides of the TV bezel,” says Birnbaum. “Last year we were using six LED bars on four sides; this year its four bars on two sides. In two years, it will be just two bars across two sides.”
Slimming Everything Down
To make gadgets truly thin, every component, from processors to memory to the display, needs to be slim yet powerful.
In processors, chip giant Intel has held the edge, creating faster chips that pack more computing power into a smaller package. By concentrating on low power yet highly efficient chips, Samsung hopes to get an edge on Intel.
“Intel has been doing high-k metal gate 32 nanometer chips for high performance computers,” says Anna Hunter, vice president of foundry services for Samsung. “But we are the first company to offer it in low power systems for consumers.”
High-k metal gate refers to use of an element called hafnium, instead of the traditional silicon dioxide, for the gate layer in a transistor. The technique helps chips stay small while improving performance.
Samsung has also said it is launching a new 2.5-inch hard disk drive Wednesday that can store 640 gigabytes of data. The drives operate at 7,200 rotations per minute.
But that drive doesn’t necessarily put Samsung ahead, says George Walsh, managing director of TechWatch, a newsletter from research firm Jon Peddie Research.
It’s the fastest hard disk drive from Samsung — but rivals have done better, he says. “I have a 10,000 rpm disk drive that I used when I put together my computer nearly a year ago,” says Walsh. “Samsung is also avoiding some of the latest technology trends in storage especially around solid state drives.”
Where Samsung truly has the competitive edge is in displays and TVs, says Riddhi Patel, an analyst for iSuppli.
“No one else has LED-backlit LCD TVs that are as thin as Samsung,” she says.
It’s a big advantage. By 2013, nearly 90 percent of the TVs sold in the U.S., will be LCDs, estimates research firm DisplaySearch.
Photo: Samsung OLED TV (fatcontroller/Flickr)
