Samsung to launch more tablets early next year

After launching a high-decibel campaign to support its iPad-rival --the Galaxy Tab -- Samsung India is in no mood to let up on the yet-to-materialise tablet market in India.

Dipesh Shah, head of India R&D, said the company will unveil "a few more" tablet models in the first half of the year, possibly including one that takes direct aim at the 10-inch one from Apple.

Shah, who heads the 3,000 strong research and development team in India, did not rule out a 10-inch version of the iPad, pointing out that there is already a large amount of content tailored for the Apple iPad.

"We will look at it," he said, adding that Samsung will soon launch its own music download service.

Other rivals, such as Nokia and Apple, have already launched their own music and application services in an attempt to entice customers to purchase their devices. It will also distribute electronic versions of newspapers, books and magazines to its Galaxy Tab customers.

Shah said the Korean firm has already launched a movie service aimed at its Galaxy Tab customers. He pointed out that in markets like the US, the operators themselves have their own content services, but in India, operators have not been very successful at addressing the content market. "In such markets, Samsung will provide the content," he said.

Samsung is positioning its tablets as 'Internet content consumption platform', instead of trying to appeal to the netbook customer. "A netbook will appeal to someone like an enterprise customer. But tablets are targeted at people who want to consume media, such as watching web videos," he added.

Shah said the company will continue to build its proprietary Bada software platform, even as it continues to chug out models based on Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone. Bada has been developed to bring smartphone like capability to even low-end models.

Instead of slowing down on a mainstream 500 megahertz (mhz) processor, Bada can run smoothly even on an entry-level 300mhz processor and works with just one, instead of two, the main processor. "Our vision is to massify the smart phone market and Bada is crucial to that," he pointed out.

Samsung had faced flak for fragmenting the already speckled smart phone market by introducing its own operating system to the milieu, Bada, five months ago.