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What impressed (and failed to impress) at Samsung Developer Conference 2014

By Shane Schick Nov 14, 2014 2:19pm

Samsung tried to accomplish a lot with its recent developer conference--new tools for wearable computing, the smart home, healthcare apps and more. It's probably no surprise that not all of it resonated with its intended audience. 

Take SAMI, a platform for health applications whose SDK was released to app developers so that they could create software to run on the SIMband device. While ostensibly something that should strike a chord with the same crowd that was all over the fitness technology craze, some developers on Twitter saw the announcement as a source of humor more than anything else.

Others thought Samsung articulated its vision for mobile health quite well.

Then there was Flow, technology that Samsung said would allow consumers to easily move app experiences from one device to another. For a number of observers this sounded like the company was still in catch-up mode with iOS.

If anything blew developers away--at least based on Twitter reaction--it was the announcements related to virtual reality such as its Gear VR headset, expected to come next month.

Perhaps most intriguing was Project Beyond, a 360-degree camera module that captures everything around it in 3D. This captured the developer sentiment on Twitter well, and is probably the best kind of conference feedback Samsung can hope for.