Counterpoint attended the sixth annual Samsung Developer’s Conference (SDC19). Each year the event has grown in size and influence. This year’s event held in San Jose, California, brought in six thousand attendees, featured 77 breakout sessions, 36 exhibitors, and 31 code labs. It was 'mission accomplished' for Samsung as the company built excitement and gave developers a lot to work with: Bixby, SmartThings, Knox security, One UI2, Samsung S-Pen, Samsung Health, Gear VR, Samsung Pay, Samsung eSIM and more.

Samsung faces tremendous competition from other ecosystems. The growth in its developer’s conference demonstrates there is accelerating interest. Samsung keenly uses its expertise in hardware, chip design, and 5G to grow this interest. It is one of the few companies with the reach to do it.

There were many interesting announcements at the event:

More foldables are coming! Samsung wants to own the foldable space. The company is working on bringing multiple foldable form factors to the market in different device categories (smartphones, tablets, other). It was a good move by Samsung to give early notice because it gives the developer community a head start on difficult integration and application work. The developer community appears excited as the coding sessions for foldable displays were among the most highly attended at the event.

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Bixby Voice, Home and Vision are evolving. Despite some hiccups, Bixby has seen steady growth. Typical users of Bixby, on average, use five to ten applications. The most common use cases are for daily and/or mundane use cases. These include setting alarms, playing music, checking the weather or traffic, and sending a text message with Bixby Voice. The ecosystem is improving but Bixby is still very basic and the primary use cases prove it. Client:Server interaction should help more sophisticated use cases.

Most of Samsung's hardware is announced during two events: the Galaxy launch event and the Note launch event. Hardware announcements at the developer’s conference was a good way for Samsung to flex its hardware muscles. Three notebooks and a ruggedized tablet were announced.

Most interesting was the Book S, an always-on-always-connected (AOAC) PC. The past AOAC PCs had been Windows on Snapdragon (Qualcomm) devices. This is the first powered by an Intel hybrid SoC. Qualcomm has been the leading force behind the category. With Intel, more PC OEM support, and 5G soon to be added, the category is poised for growth.

See our complete report, "Samsung Developer's Conference Gives a Glimpse into its Future" for more details on:

• Samsung Knox is integrated with Samsung Pass
• One UI2
• 5G opportunities
• Sneak peek at 6G
• Samsung DeX pivots
• Samsung TVs and 8k
• Samsung Upcycling program