Samsung SRT746AWTN Refrigerator

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technology with 2007 consolidated sales of US$103.4 billion. Employing approximately 150,000 people in 134 offices in 62 countries, the company consists of five main business units: Digital Media Business, LCD Business, Semiconductor Business, Telecommunication Business and Digital Appliance Business. Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs.

The Challenge

Samsung’s SRT746AWTN (Zipel e-diary) refrigerator with built-in digital photo frame and network connectivity is part of the company’s world leading digital convergence line of electronics. Given the inherent difficulties associated with developing an advanced GUI for this new and emerging market segment, Samsung knew it had a challenge on its hands.

The task itself was made even more difficult due to the difficulties associated with having to manage a number of incumbent different software platforms across different divisions and project teams. But with the strong track record of Samsung’s video display division in previously commercializing a number of Qt based devices, the company looked to Nokia Qt Development Frameworks first as its single platform of choice to build a compelling GUI for this product’s embedded Linux environment.

The Solution

As a development environment, Samsung used QtCreator and Eclipse with Qt plugins. The company also used QtGui, QtNetwork and QtSQL to bring a rich set of development features to bear on the project so that Samsung engineers were able to prototype applications quickly before final deployment.

Samsung’s engineers found programming with Qt intuitive and straightforward despite an initial learning curve and some additional challenges associated with debugging and performance optimization. Refrigerator-housed GUIs being somewhat of an emerging area of technology, Samsung was encouraged to find that Nokia Qt Development Frameworks is still constantly evolving Qt with new features such as Qt Quick. The company actually updated to from Qt version 4.5 to 4.6 during the project’s development to take advantage of improved graphics performance.

The Value

Code reuse and code examples plus the presence of a strong online documentation resource helped Samsung reduce development time and ensure that the project team was able to take advantage of the full breadth of the Qt toolkit. Qt helped Samsung to unify the software platform used in this division of the company and no other third party technologies were needed to make this happen.

The SRT746AWTN refrigerator’s impressive GUI functions smoothly and gives users the same experience as that found with other advanced touch devices. As this was the first Qt project in this division, Samsung helped Nokia Qt Development Frameworks gain a greater understanding of the industry requirements associated with the DirectFB software library and hardware acceleration. The end result of this process is that end-users are able to benefit from a similar experience to than found on other touch devices, but on a brand “new” form factor.