After loads and loads of rumours that were coming out from the rumour mills surrounding the Samsung Galaxy S III, it was on May 3, 2012 when Samsung officially, took covers off the device and put all the rumours to rest.
We do know that the security of the S III was the highest ever for any Samsung device. But the real question is how Sammy actually managed to do it? Well Samsung itself has spilled the beans to let us know how it achieved it.
Secret from the closed ones:
All the designers, engineers and developers who were working on the S III had tough time dealing about it with their family. We generally never keep any secret from our near and dear ones but the brains working on the S III had to do it.
Senior Engineer Young Doo Jin (S/W R&D) was always bombarded with questions from family and friends as he says, “I got so many questions about the Galaxy S III from friends and family. But I’d say ‘don’t ask me or you’ll get me fired.’ I told them to check it out after it was officially made public.” Thankfully, the people around him were understanding and cared much to respect his work.
Principal Engineer Byung Joon Lee (Mechanical R&D) was also grilled by family members. “My eldest son is in 6th grade. He knew that I had worked on the Galaxy S and S II. So I guess he assumed that I’d do S III also. Every time he saw an article on the internet about the Galaxy S III he’d ask ‘Dad! You’re making the S III, right?’ But all I could say was ‘I don’t really know.’ It was really awkward.”
So it feels like the member of the S III team indeed had to live a double-life to keep all the Galaxy S III secrets into their hearts.
No pictures or drawings:
The developers faced a tough time while designing the S III and also keeping it under the wraps and they used to work in a separate lab with security cards, fingerprint readers and everything, designated only for the few that were approved for this top-secret project.
Even the prototypes were put in security boxes to be moved, even if it was just across the hallway, to prevent the passers-by in the facility from catching a glimpse of the S III. So you can definitely guess that taking pictures of the device was just out of question.
Principal Engineer Byung Joon Lee (Mechanical R&D) said, “Because we were only permitted to see the products and others weren’t, we couldn’t send pictures or drawings. We had to explain the Galaxy S III with all sorts of words. The Procurement Department had to set a price for the Galaxy S III and purchase the materials based on our verbal explanations. It was hard for everyone I guess. Hahaha.”
Many prototypes and dummy boxes:
We had heard about this earlier that Samsung used dummy boxes to disguise the Galaxy S III while it was taken out of the facility so that no one could even guess what the content was. And now this has been confirmed from Samsung themselves.
Principal Engineer Woo Sun Yoon (H/W R&D) explained how all of it worked, saying, “We had to make three types of the Galaxy SIII to prevent the design from leaking. And on top of that, whenever any of these had to go out for testing, we put them inside ‘dummy boxes’, which are cases that hide the design of the device, to disguise it. Even if people, inside or out of the campus, saw the device, I doubt they would have known what it was.”
At the end we are happy that Samsung was indeed successful in keeping the final design of the S III top-secret until the official unveiling and we hope that Apple, which is its sole competitor, should learn from the Korean giant on how to keep its upcoming devices under the covers as we have recently seen multiple leaks with regards to the upcoming iPhone 5.