service this year, Samsung's local operation was quick to help. Fingi's software allowed a Thai hotel to offer guests a Galaxy on check-in which they could use to open doors, control air conditioning, lighting and TV and order room service.
When Samsung's UK operations heard about Fingi they decided to use it to help promote the Galaxy S III at the London Olympics, said Carl Rubin, Fingi's vice president of business development. Within weeks, he said, Samsung had struck deals with hotels and helped set up the technology to make it work. "They turned on a dime and got this done," he said.
The Fingi initiative made use of the near-field communication chip inside some Galaxy devices, a hint of where Samsung sees more opportunities. Delta Partners' Pages says Samsung recently hired one of Visa Inc's mobile payments executives and patented the words "Samsung wallet."
SAMSUNG STORES
But its efforts to build a direct and binding relationship with users in the way Apple has done have been less convincing.
It has flagship stores in several countries which share Apple's light tones and open invitations to play with devices, but a recent lunchtime visit to Singapore's main store saw only a handful of visitors and a couple of staff. A cleaning woman was mopping the floor.
Singapore has also pioneered improved customer service where staff will pick up an errant device from the user and offer a loan unit while it's under repair. But a member of staff at one of the two service centers said loan units weren't always available.
Similar issues can be found online. An important part of keeping mobile users happy is ensuring their device's core programs are up to date. The most popular feature on one Samsung fan website, SamMobile, is a twitter feed alerting users to when such software updates are due. It has 20,000 followers and is updated more than a dozen times a day. Samsung's official equivalent feed has only 3,307 followers, and was last updated in December.
The owner of SamMobile, Rotterdam-based Danny Dorresteijn, says he has tried in vain to forge a closer relationship. "Samsung is not a big fan of us," he said. But he's hopeful. "Everything takes time."
Indeed, there are signs that Samsung is learning it needs to use social media better. When two Indian bloggers flown by Samsung to a technology show in Berlin last week complained online that they had been stranded because they refused to wear a Samsung uniform and tout Galaxy phones, the company was quick to apologise.
Last month, Samsung hired Damien Cummings, Dell's former Asia online director, for a new social media marketing role. In a blog post, Cummings said he aimed to "help transform Samsung into a digital powerhouse."
BRAND LOYALTY
Samsung does appear to be slowly winning people over.
Surveys of users in Britain and the United States by Strategy Analytics concluded that while 51 percent of Apple users would replace their Apple device with an Apple device, they were only slightly less likely to switch and buy a Samsung.
A bigger problem for Samsung, says David Mercer, the co-author of the Strategy Analytic surveys, is that there's little sign that user loyalty to Samsung phones translates to buying other Samsung products. A Samsung phone user may buy another Samsung phone, "but they won't automatically buy a TV," he says.
Given that Samsung is the world's largest TV maker, that's a significant miss. "That indicates those important branches of the company have continued to do their own thing," says Mercer.
It also raises questions about Samsung's efforts to build an ecosystem beyond mobile phones to embrace other parts of its consumer electronics business, especially so-called smart TVs - Internet-connected TVs that can work more like computers, running apps, storing and downloading content and, crucially, interacting with other consumer devices.
It's not that Samsung isn't busy working with TV stations and other service providers to build smart TV services. In the past week, it has announced deals with TeliaSonera and France TV in Europe, and Alt Media Sdn Bhd in Malaysia. The problem, Mercer says, is that consumers need to be convinced its useful. "Once they have it, they love it," he says.
At the heart of Samsung's challenge is to weave these products together with content and services that make it hard for users to jump elsewhere when they tire of their devices. While Samsung has long mastered engineering, it's only recently woken up to the fact that users want something more.
"Samsung will start to realise, if they haven't already, that they have to lock people in with some kind of ecosystem," said Napoleon Biggs, head of digital integration for Asia at Fleishman-Hillard. "How else will you keep people's loyalty?