Samsung's smartphone hat-trick

For a few months now we have been wondering why Samsung has a range of impressive GSM smartphones on sale in the US, but not in the UK. Well we need wonder no more as it appears that the two models, the i500 and i700, will reach the UK in the next few months.

The intriguing thing is that they will be launched at roughly the same time as another new Samsung handset, the D710. This puts Samsung in the unique position of offering a trio of smartphones that all use different operating systems, namely MS Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian.

Our fave is likely to be the i700, which is an upright phone (it is like a smaller version of the O2 XDA 2), which uses microsoft’s Pocket PC phone edition software to deliver applications like Outlook and Internet Explorer. Samsung is also claiming the phone can access the Internet via wireless (802.11b) networks if an SD/IO card is added.

We have written about the D710, which uses the Symbian operating system with Nokia’s Series 60 interface, before. It is like a larger version of the Siemens SL55 in that the bottom half of the phone slides down to reveal its keypad (see also the Sharp TM100).

Its key feature though is a 1.0 mega pixel camera (a first for Samsung). Other features include capture and playback and MP3. Annoyingly the phone only has a 65k colour screen, which put it behind the rush of new phones with superior 262k colour screens.

Finally Samsung is pandering to Palm fans with the i500. It is a small-ish clamshell phone with a swivelling screen that runs Palm’s 5.2 operating system. It features a 65k colour screen, VGA camera and is compatible with the Graffiti handwriting recognition system.
Samsung announced several more phones this week and we’ll fill in the gaps in a couple of days time.