If I had to guess, I'd say that B&O knows exactly what Samsung had plans to do and not do. That kind of thing is almost certainly explicitly spelled out in their partnership. This is a difficult area for B&O and frankly, for me, a puzzling one for them to delve into with their own branded handsets. They obviously know the complexities of mobile design are a bit more than they care to tackle themselves. So, a partnership with a handset maker does make sense.
However, I do agree that you have to wonder how they see the market. They obviously don't consider top end phone features a priority - that's obvious both from what the Serenata lacks and their management's comments on what was important to them in the interview here and on Bright.nl. The partnership is almost certainly more about leveraging their technology to Samsung vs working with Samsung to help them get into teh mobile market. The volume Samsung can move in the market probably represents a good revenue stream for them as they likely are making money on every Samsung unit sold that contains ICEpower. In the Bright.nl interview, they state that the Serene volume is less than 100,000 units, which even they know is a tiny fraction of the worldwide market. That would all be fine, except for teh fact that these 2 units are rolling out at the exact same time. There's no opportunity for the Serenata to retain the sole spotlight with a unique feature that no other unit has. This seems poorly planned as they were certainly involved in helping Samsung develop the SGH-i450. But, given the low volume expectations, maybe they don't care all that much, especially if they don't plan on introducing the next model for 2 years. You can't help but think though that, other than as a status symbol, why someone would buy the much higher priced, less feature filled model? The partnership with Samsung to sell their tech I can completely understand and I can even understand reciprocation to make their own handsets, but why allow the 2 models to come out at exactly the same time?
The one caveat here is performance. We don't know how the SGH-i450 sounds. With a focus more on an all around quality phone than just a music device, Samsung may not have incorporated (or was allowed to incorporate) all of the Serenata's musical benefits. I wonder how that wheel embedded in the speaker area of the SGH-i450 will impact sound. And again, there's the EQ question. That by itself could be the difference between it sounding great for a speaker its size to just like every other ultraportable speaker out there. I'd very much like to hear what people have to say after getting their hands on the SGH-i450.
Jeff
