I’ve been at the launch event for the new Samsung Galaxy SIII in Sydney today, and here are some first impressions of the device.

The phone interface has been designed to more closely understand how we behave, that personal affinity is getting deeper and you can really see them trying to think of this as an extension to the physical self.

Their choice of mobile phone is already a very personal and emotional decision for a lot of users and technology companies are trying to both capture that essence and drive it through closer integration, not integration with IT systems but integration with us.

Some of the cool things which talk to that were:

1. The phone is watching you all the time – I know it sounds creepy at first but it knows when to be bright and ready to view and when to switch off or dim itself. Not only does this save energy it saves that annoying need to tap the screen every 30 seconds as on “some devices”.

2. Intuitive voice recognition, ala Siri, but with some ability to personalise commands for the way you say things. It learns too, so will get better at understanding what you want.

3. Predictive and context aware behaviour – it knows that if you’re writing a message and then put your phone to your ear you probably want to call that person.

4. It’s super social – every feature has a share component with it, whether transferring files using NFC (near field communications) or auto sharing photos based on facial recognition with your friends.

With all of this hyper personalisation the urge to get one and use it for everything all the time will be hard to resist. As devices take bigger and bigger steps to being part of us, it’s easy to see BYOD being impossible to escape.

Luckily like us with our Gen-i Managed Mobility Service, Samsung has been thinking about that too. A bunch of nifty little enterprise features are built into the device to help keep IT departments calm.

Apart from being FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) compliant, putting it in the same space as BlackBerry, Samsung now has the ability to run an entirely separate instance of the operating system and for business vs personal, and seamlessly switch between the two.

See more on that here:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/09/samsung-boosts-vmware-plan-to-virtualize-android-phones-tablets/