Upcoming phones to look for – March 2012

Post MWC 2012 (Mobile World Congress), the mobile world is getting ready for some seriously hardcore entries at all levels of the budget spectrum. The tech world was taken by storm as new smartphone entries made their debut this year in the form of high-end and heavily powered devices in all new shapes and sizes. Here are just a few of the recently unveiled devices that we’re most looking forward to seeing in our labs.  

Samsung Galaxy Beam 

Samsung's Galaxy Beam with its built-in projector

There has been an influx of projector-infused mobile handsets in India, over the last year or so. Although, some that were more innovative than the others managed to fare quite well, they all lacked a certain refinement, that and the fact that they all ran on the Java platform didn’t make them overly appealing. Samsung’s previous iteration of the Beam didn’t quite make a big enough impact, but this latest edition with its Dual Core Cortex A9 1GHz processor and built-in nHD (640 x 360) projector should offer a significant amount of drool value. Like most other Samsung smartphones, this handset will be pre-equipped to handle popular video codecs and FLAC support for audio. It’ll come running Gingerbread but could also get a possible upgrade to ICS (yet to be confirmed).

The all new Samsung Beam will feature - 

• a 4.0-inch capacitive touchscreen with a 480 x 800 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi with DLNA support and hotspot functionality
• Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0
• GPS with A-GPS Support
• 5MP AF camera with 720p video recording and an LED flash
• Secondary 1.3MP Camera
• 8GB internal memory plus microSD card support up to 32GB

Nokia Pureview 808 

Featuring an impressive 41MP camera

Although it may not have been the very best idea to have introduced this device with their ‘not-faring-too-well’ Belle OS, at the moment WP7 is nowhere near to having the capabilities to offer the kind of goodies this handset will feature. First off, the 1.3HGz processor should be more than adequate to run things smoothly, Nokia bringing back the Xenon flash to mobile cameras is definitely a good thing with Carl Zeiss optics for this fascinating camera phone and the resolution prescribed, we’re expecting image quality to be off the charts. The all new camera tech installed into this handset, includes 3x lossless digital amongst an array of other handy features. Nokia has pretty much loaded up the 808 with as much functionality as possible, and we’re very curious to see just how it all works out. 

The Pureview 808 will come with - 

• a 4.0-inch capacitive touchscreen with a 360 x 640 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi with DLNA support 
• Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0 with USB-on-the-go
• GPS with A-GPS Support
• 41MP AF camera with 1080p video recording and a Xenon flash
• Secondary VGA Camera
• FM radio with an FM transmitter
• 16GB internal memory plus microSD card support up to 32GB
• HDMI out

Huawei Ascend D Quad 

Huawei's quad-core device - the Ascend D Quad

The dual Core ‘engine’ has been further upgraded to the all new mobile edition of Quad Core processors. Huawei, who might have been one of the background players, is now taking centre stage at most of the big mobile events and quite enjoying the limelight. With this their upcoming Ascend D, ICS running Quad Core (1.2GHz Huawei K3V2 chip) smartphone, Huawei is planning on bringing the big guns out blazing. Active noise cancellation for better audio on calls is also provisioned for and Dolby has also contributed their Mobile 3.0 Plus engine for sound enhancement. 

The specs of the Ascend D include - 

• a 4.5-inch capacitive (IPS) touchscreen with a 720 x 1280 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi with DLNA support and hotspot functionality
• Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0 
• GPS with A-GPS Support
• 8MP AF camera with 1080p video recording and Dual LED flash
• Secondary 1.3MP video calling camera
• 8GB internal memory plus microSD card support up to 32GB
• MHL (Mobile HD link)