Above: Terry Weech, Sales Director, Samsung. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.

Originally published in Newsday’ BusinessDay for June 11, 2020.

Even months later, it wasn’t hard to hear the regret in the voice of Terry Weech as he acknowledged that Samsung’s new line of Galaxy smartphones, the S20 series, was launched just before the lockdowns accompanying the spread of Covid-19 began.

“We were not able to do our interviews while all that was going on,” he explained.

Nor were local vendors and suppliers able to introduce customers to the newest iteration of the company’s top of the line smartphones.

Instead, the product sat in stores behind shuttered doors, waiting for customers who were also behind their own doors.

“The product is in the market, it’s in Gulf City and Movietowne,” Weech said, “it’s there but we haven’t been able to create the kind of buzz we usually stir up with a launch.”

The company plans to begin doing something about that over the next few weeks as restrictions are lifted in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Weech was particularly bullish about the S20 Ultra, a smartphone that’s just a fraction of an inch larger than the Note10 + and 0.1 of an inch away from being a seven-inch tablet. 

Asked about the relevance of a top of the line smartphone in today’s communications hungry environment, Weech responded that, “The differences between our Galaxy family and our Note family is really your preference for the stylus and the camera system.”

“In terms of a device that you can use, that you can pair with your TV, that you can use with a keyboard. you will have, with your S20, a device that is a computer. As a device that will serve your communication needs, this is a product that excels.”

For anyone with concerns about the size of the device, the S20 is sized for users with a smaller handgrip.

Aware of sanitary concerns in the era of Covid-19, Samsung has acquired an appropriate product to bundle with the S20 series devices, a UV phone sanitizer that uses ultraviolet light to destroy 99 percent of microbes on the surface of an electronic device.

Powered by a phone charger, it can also run off a suitable external battery, making it an excellent tool for sanitizing any electronic device that can fit into it.

Expect it to be used for phones being tested at dealers as well.

“We will start doing interesting things before the end of the month,” Weech promised, “but we are incredibly sensitive to the issues that we are facing now, and we want to be sure that the things we do don’t endanger life and health.”

“We have a lot of exciting things, innovative things coming along.”