Open letter to Samsung

[elektronaut]

I'm a happy owner of your audio player T9 and enjoy it's qualities. One of the reasons I purchased it, is that it supports the free Ogg Vorbis audio codec. Samsung seems to be quite interested in Open Source projects. Besides using the Ogg Vorbis codec, the player and the accompanying software Samsung Media Studio also use the XVid video codec. I also read that even the operating system of the player is based on Linux. I can understand your company's choices. I'm a Linux user myself because I prefer having freedom of choice to being dependent on the choices of a monopoly.

The T9 comes with a firmware featuring MTP connectivity. MTP is only supported by Microsoft Windows so far. Thanks to the forum www.anythingbutipod.com I found out that your company also released a firmware that allows to connect to other operating systems, like Linux. That's great.

What is not so great is that I had to find a computer with Microsoft Windows installed in order to flash the firmware on the player. For me, this was quite a hassle costing me more than half a day. (The Windows system also needed some updates, etc. Take a look at the problems described in a lot of posts in the aforementioned forum and you know what I'm talking about.)

You could easily choose a more consumer friendly approach here. For example, you could pre-load both the MTP and the UMS firmware images on the player. This would just use about 14 MB. A menu option could allow to choose which one to install. Or, as a quick fix, you could decide to pre-install the UMS version and provide the MTP version on the CD-ROM. This way, independent of the operating system, the user could still choose to limit his device to only work with Windows Media Player. Even for non-technical people flashing the firmware would be quite easy if the player would be shown in the file explorer from the beginning on.

Please respect the choice of customers. Some are not willing to use Microsoft Windows. We might not represent an important market share yet, but our number is growing...

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I posted this here in order to get some feedback, suggestions and corrections - english is not my mother tongue. I would be happy if somebody has ideas how to get in contact with the people at Samsung who are making these decisions. Customer support would probably just reply with some standard text module.

[coppertop]

Unfortunately, HQ in foreign countries (Korea in this case), can only go by the information provided by each subsidiary.

Your letter, if it reaches the right people withing Samsung America, can be forwarded to Korea and development will change.

As it stands, the MP3 player standard in North America is MTP...Sandisk, Creative, etc....so Samsung Korea will make MTP the standard for NA-bound players.

Once they are told that customers in the US would like the choice...and once...this is the important part...Samsung America AGREES to the extra few cents/unit that this change will cost, things will change.

Unfortunately, those extra few cents, when discussing hundreds of thousands of units, will be a very big cost.

[elektronaut]

Unfortunately, HQ in foreign countries (Korea in this case), can only go by the information provided by each subsidiary.

I don't understand. Why shouldn't it be possible to find out the contact information for people who work in the HQ? An E-Mail address would be all we need.

As it stands, the MP3 player standard in North America is MTP...Sandisk, Creative, etc....so Samsung Korea will make MTP the standard for NA-bound players.

Well, that's just the typical way of ignoring a minority of the customers. Just like all those hardware vendors who only provide closed-source Windows drivers for their products. I think that the companies should generally reconsider their way of doing business. Some already started, e.g. Intel is offering Open Source drivers for Linux for their WiFi cards.
Come on, Samsung is profiting from the Open Source scene, as mentioned in my first post. The fact that they are providing a UMS version seems to indicate that they are beware of people not using Windows, don't you think?

Unfortunately, those extra few cents, when discussing hundreds of thousands of units, will be a very big cost.

I don't see how this could raise the production cost at all. It's either just a firmware change or - if they would provide the MTP firmware on the CD-ROM - just a little change in the CD-ROM software bundle. In both cases it would only be a one-time cost. Just a couple of man hours in case of the CD-ROM option, a couple of days in case of the firmware change. And - contrary to your statement - the more players they produce, the lesser the proportionate cost per unit. It sure wouldn't be done for the already produced players, just for the future ones.