Samsung’s Kevin Packingham has departed from the company. Packingham served as the chief product officer and spent two years with Samsung Mobile. He played a role in the introduction of many of Samsung’s top devices including the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S 4. The reason for his leaving remains a mystery and Samsung hasn’t yet confirmed if this was a voluntary move.
Samsung did issue a statement, though it was on the vague side as far as departure statements go. Samsung Mobile spokesperson, Ashley Wimberly said rather simply that; “Kevin Packingham has departed Samsung Mobile.” She also went on to say they “thank Kevin for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavors.” Packingham has yet to issue any statement or confirmation.
Aside from working on some of the bigger devices coming out of Samsung, Packingham also dealt with the carriers. In fact, he recently spoke about how Samsung was able to take a different approach with the carriers. He touched on how carriers often have to do much of the advertising in addition to the selling of the hardware.
As many will likely realize, Samsung took care of quite a bit of advertising, which according to Packingham, that “took a lot of burden off the carriers.” Anyway, with no hints as to where he may be headed next, we can look back in history. Packingham previously served as chief executive of Amerilink Telecom and was also with Sprint as a product executive.
SOURCE: The New York Times Bits Blog
Maybe he is responsible for the “benchmark optimization”. Samsung’s cheating on benchmarks does NOT help the Android community.
He left because Samsung Korea’s CFO realized they weren’t making any money on the Galaxy III:
— The phone’s display is outrageously expensive at 4+” of AMOLED,
— The cost of Google’s Android operating system,
— All this technology +++ is sold for $100 AND,
— They are wrapping each phone with a few hundred dollar bills when they ship to their carriers
Poof… there’s no money left for, ahhhh, right: PROFIT ALL GONE!