If you’re one of the chosen 740,000 Walmart associates, a new smartphone is coming your way which is meant to simplify your life. Samsung has reached an agreement with the retail giant to provide smartphones that employees will be using for work and for personal reasons as well, specifically the Galaxy XCover Pro. Apparently, this is the Korean OEM’s biggest mobile enterprise deal in the U.S and should bring good numbers to this particular smartphone that wasn’t really making waves in the general market.
Walmart’s in-house software development team was developing an app that was meant to help employees with their actual work and for assisting customers as well. Some of the features mentioned were mobile clock-in and checking schedules and shifts. For the hardware part of this project, they approached Samsung and chose the XCover Pro as the device that would serve as the Walmart associates’ work device and personal smartphone as well.
Having the smartphone will also do away with two other devices that employees had to carry around. The walkie-talkie is being replaced with the phone’s push-to-talk feature through a programmable key. The barcode scanner is being replaced with the camera-based barcode scanning tech that will be programmed on the phone as well. This way, they just have to use the XCover Pro for those times when they would have previously used the two devices.
Samsung is also leveraging its Knox Suite as it lets admins do things like update the firmware, run analytics, and even customize the software as needed. And since the phones will be used as personal devices too, Knox can be used to create work and personal profiles. This way, both the company data will remain secure and the employee’s personal data will remain private. We don’t know of course if associates will feel comfortable using a work phone as a personal phone but at least there’s that option.
The 740,000 Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro will be deployed to Walmart associates over the next few months. This can also be a good way for Samsung to push their B2B business which can sometimes be more lucrative than B2C.