Samsung official shares company’s vision for public-safety communications in U.S.

As public safety embraces such smartphone-enabled functionalities, Jones envisions that there eventually will be a “humble transition” in the devices carried by public-safety personnel.

“As the smartphone delivers more capabilities that are very easy for the first responder to use—such as e-citations, note taking, records management and computer-aided dispatch—that there are pieces of equipment that you will one day [will be replaced],” Jones said.

“[First responders] will say, ‘I don’t think I need to carry that with me today. I’ve been using my smartphone non-stop for the last several months, and it is delivering a great note-taking capability. It’s delivering instant messages from my computer-aided dispatch, so I no longer need my pager. It’s connecting me to my case-management workload and my workflow from the station to the car to when I’m walking around in my neighborhood.’

“That transition, I think it’s going to take some time for it to happen. I think the inherent capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S9 are there, but we need to build the overall ecosystem that’s supporting those capabilities, so that it’s really easy for first responders to use.”

Such replacements are especially important as public-safety agencies try to support normal operations at a time when many budgets are constrained, Jones said.

“As governments now are looking at reducing costs and taking advantage of technology to deliver these communications … [Samsung] can deliver a framework, a common approach, with learnings across agencies and across geographies that would suggest, ‘This is how you provide communications. This is how you provide manageability. This is how you provide security,’ Jones said.

“We can do it in such a way that it is hopefully reducing that cost and allowing the agencies themselves to adopt more, if they want to. If a budget-constrained group says, ‘I have 500 officers, but I can only afford to put 350 phones in their hands,’ what do we do with that other 150? If I save them enough money on other compute solutions and connectivity, now they can equip everybody.”