Samsung Galaxy S4: Will you use this at work?

It was really cold waiting in that line which stretched around the block outside Radio City Music Hall in New York this Thursday, and I was just thinking that how weird it was to be coming there to see a new smartphone rather than the Rockettes when two young men who looked like they might still be teenagers came up behind me.

“Do you know if you can buy tickets to this?” one of them asked. We explained that it was unlikely, since this was a product launch. They looked completely heartbroken. “But we heard they were letting the public in. We came from Boston for this.”

Who knew the Samsung Galaxy S4 would have such fanboys? It would have delighted the executives who put on an elaborate Broadway show-style extravaganza to unveil the device, which was described as a “life companion.” Instead of merely explaining all the features, they staged scenes that included parents taking pictures of their son’s first tap dancing recital, a pair of backpackers meeting up on the road and the private life of a movie star.

There was just one awkward transition: about mid-way through the show one of the Samsung execs, director of product marketing Ryan Biden, said we should be aware of Knox, an IT security technology that allowed the phone to have two different “halves.” One half of the phone could be used to privately store work-related data and applications, while the other could be used for all the fun things we were seeing onstage.

This part wasn’t really a scene of its own; it was more like an intermission, which says a lot about Samsung’s efforts to position the Galaxy S4 as a business device. Whereas BlackBerry still touts its corporate capabilities and invited scores of IT executives to the Toronto launch of its Z10 device, Samsung is taking the Apple route, where enterprise functionality is, at best, ignored. But Apple changed the game with the iPhone in that its product infiltrated the office like nothing else before it. That’s why companies are now struggling to create bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs to accommodate consumer gadgets.

Knox is an interesting technology that will no doubt be helpful here, but Samsung seemed uneasy with exploring the enterprise opportunities around the Galaxy S4 much further. Which is too bad, because I could see some possibilities. The dual camera mode that allows the person taking a video to place a small box of themselves in the shot would be great for mobile videoconferencing. The Galaxy S4’s “Air Touch” would mean sales people could do a presentation on their smartphone for a client by setting it on a desk and treating it like a laptop. The phone’s “smart pause” feature that detects when someone has looked away means a busy executive who watches a training video or other multimedia content wouldn’t lose their place as they multitask.

Samsung should consider marketing these kinds of ideas to business users rather than try desperately to look as cool as Apple. “Isn’t this amazing?” Samsung president JK Shin asked when the phone was first revealed. No, it wasn’t, and if you took away the giant stage and fancy sets, he was still just a guy in a glorified informercial, wearing the kind of suit and tie combo that Steve Jobs would have mocked. The Galaxy S4 won’t really be a “life companion” if it’s only used to take vacation pictures or play games. As anyone with a career that depends on access to mobile computing could tell you, there’s more to life than that.