Samsung clients based in Ireland will from yesterday be getting their products purchased from the Korean electronics company delivered to their doorstep by drone.

In an effort to facilitate end-to-end contactless shopping experience for its customers, Samsung Electronics yesterday announced a new partnership with Irish drone delivery services provider Manna Drone Delivery, which is set to take off the ground beginning with Irish customers who will be purchasing the latest range of Samsung’s Galaxy devices – which include the S21 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds Pro, the Galaxy Tab S7, the Galaxy Watch 3, and Samsung’s recently launched Galaxy A Series – via the company’s online store.

“The new service, which is a first for Samsung globally, will facilitate an end-to-end contactless experience for Samsung customers from their initial online order through the company’s Irish e-Store, right through to fulfilment,” Samsung said in a statement to announce the partnership. “The service will first be made available to customers based in Oranmore with Samsung and Manna keen to expand this service nationwide in the future.”

Based in Dublin, Manna Drone Delivery uses custom-developed aerospace grade drones to deliver products directly to customer’s homes.  According to the company, their drones fly at an altitude of 50-80 meters and a speed of over 60 kilometres per hour – enabling delivery to homes in Oranmore within three minutes.

“At Samsung we are always looking for ways to bring meaningful innovation to our customers so we’re really excited to be the first technology company in Ireland to make our products available to our customers via drone delivery,” Eamonn Grant, Head of Online for Samsung Ireland said. “To be able to deliver our products to our customers within three minutes of leaving the dispatch centre is a brilliant example of innovation in motion.

“Superior customer experience is at the heart of what we do and with this new service we are embracing what we believe will be the future of retail. In the current environment, there is no better time to provide a contactless alternative to ‘click and collect’ and we are really thrilled to be partnering Manna to achieve this.

“This partnership with Samsung marks the first of its kind in the world. We recognise that the potential for the application of drone delivery is enormous. Samsung is one of the most innovative and widely recognized brands globally that always puts its customers front and centre. It’s for this reason we are genuinely excited to be embarking on this next chapter with them,” said Alan Hicks, CTO of Manna.

If you’re in Oranmore and purchase the listed Samsung products today, a drone is already wait to bring your order to you.

Samsung has used drone technology before, in its home country, Korea, where the company successfully demonstrated the application of drones in configuring 4G and 5G networks antennas at the Seoul Headquarters.

In the demonstration, an engineer on the ground used a smartphone with a remote control application to fly a camera-equipped drone that captured photos of the antennas installed on a building’s rooftop. The visual data was viewable via the engineer’s smartphone and then was transmitted to a cloud server within seconds. The deep learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) solution instantly verified the rotation and tilt of the antennas, so that the engineers could determine if the antennas were installed correctly at predefined optimal angles.