Samsung was able to keep the Galaxy S III in the spotlight but under wraps right up to the May 3rd launch. So how did the company pull it off? A new blog post on Samsung’s official company blog, Samsung Tomorrow, provides a little insight.
So just how secret was the project? Well, Samsung engineer Buyong-Joon Lee had to deny what he was working on to his 11-year old son, who knew his father had worked on the first two Galaxy models. Inside the labs, handsets were moved between facilities in locked boxes, while the prototypes were personally delivered by a globetrotting executive to network partners. The company went as far as producing three entirely different models, each one constructed as if it was the final product, so the team had to build and rebuild components to accommodate each design.
Samsung prevented everyone working on the project from taking pictures of their work. This may sound like a normal thing to do when maintaining security, but it proved challenging to engineers, who had to rely on verbal descriptions of their work to pass along to other members of the Galaxy S III development team. This would have proved to be quite difficult indeed.
Still, all of Samsung’s secret Galaxy S III development paid off as the only “real” prototype which hit the internet before the May 3rd launch event turned out to look nothing like the final device, enabling the launch to go off without spoiling the surprise.