NEW YORK—Samsung unveiled its new high-tech showroom Wednesday to a select group of media and analysts. Located in New York’s swanky Time Warner Center, the “Samsung Experience” follows in the footsteps of Sony’s popular Style stores, located in New York and San Francisco.
The 10,000-square-foot showroom features 10 separate themed areas focusing on home, work and play. Launched with a wide array of partners including Mark Cuban’s HDNet and the MIT Media Lab, the Samsung Experience promises a destination for tourists and locals alike to sample and play with a wide range of Samsung’s digital products.
According to MIT Media Center Director Nicholas Negroponte, who was digitally beamed into the launch event via video tape, Samsung’s new showroom focuses on device convergence and personal convergence. Negroponte envisioned a world where devices do multiduty, morphing into digital Swiss Army knives of voice, music, video, home security and more. His vision of the convergence of home and work lives was vaguely disquieting, but the audience of Samsung executives, reporters and hangers-on seemed mostly bowled over by the array of technology, rather than the limiting capabilities.
It’s a good thing the store isn’t designed to sell products. Many of the hundreds of products on display—including a fascinating lineup of video- and photo-enabled cell phones—aren’t available today in the United States. Other unavailable products were also on display, including a revamped 50-inch DLP (digital light processing) projector, notebook computers and a high-tech refrigerator and dryer.
Sony held a dueling event Wednesday night; this one focused on the new 1000-square-foot Qualia showroom carved out of the Style store’s basement space. With a more exclusive, and decidedly hipper celebrity-wannabe crowd, Sony’s event focused on the company’s ultra-luxury digital lineup.
Focusing on ultra-high end components, easy-to-use interfaces and super-inflated prices, the Qualia line brings the Louis Vuitton sheen to digital products. Featuring $3000 2-megapixel cameras that appeared to take amazingly crisp photos, along with ultra-high-end headphones designed for Super Audio CDs and a 46-inch LCD flat-panel television, the products themselves were stunning.
The HD-resolution TV, coupled with a Blu-ray DVD player, was particularly amazing. Alas, the 1920-by-1080-pixel display and source were marred by compression artifacts, particularly on some of the water screens. Still, the colors and apparent 3-D were stunning, especially because this was an LCD and not a plasma.
Sony has hired a staff of luxury goods experts to provide personal demonstrations of the luxury digital products to well-heeled customers. The staffer I talked with studied at one of the finest business schools in Paris, with a focus on managing luxury goods brands. He was both well-versed in the ins and outs of the product, and focused on how an ultra-high-end product line can add luster to the rest of a company’s brands.
Why throw a competing event on the same day as upstart Samsung? “That’s a question for Samsung,” said Phil Boyle, Qualia’s product marketing manager, intimating that they had set their date before the Korean company.
Samsung had not responded to requests for comment by the time this article was published.
The two events highlighted the differences between the two global rivals. Samsung’s effort seemed to say “I’ve arrived” as a high-quality provider of stylish and technically advanced digital convergence devices. Sony, on the other hand, seemed to be changing the rules of the game by offering somewhat advanced technology at super-inflated prices.
How successful will the two be? With its premier location on the third floor of Manhattan’s first luxury mall, Samsung’s store should be a hit. The path to success for Sony’s Qualia has more twists. As one attendee lamented, “If you buy a super-expensive car and park it out front, you might get noticed by the girls. A tiny $3,500 digital camera just ain’t going to get you (noticed).”
But clearly there’s a fairly large audience of people in the United States with more money than taste. And according to Boyle, he can’t make enough of some of his Qualia products, including some of the high-end HD screens. The products are certainly stunning. But is that enough?
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