3GSM: Samsung Shows More Ultra Handsets

Samsung has thrown down a bunch of Ultra Multimedia handsets. Some of these were previously shown at ITU Telecom World 2006.

The first one is the recently discovered Ultra Smart F700, the touch-screen phone with a slide-out QWERTY keypad. It features a 2.78-inch, 440x240 res display, a 5 megapixel camera, GSM/EDGE/UMTS as well as HSDPA, a full HTML web browser and microSD expansion slot. All this is neatly wrapped in a 16.4mm shell.

The Ultra Smart F520 is a dual-slider, a slide out QWERTY keypad and another vertical slider with a phone keypad, but it's a little bigger, being 17.4mm thin.

It has a smaller, 3 megapixel camera with flash, but it gives a bigger, 3-inch, 480x272 touch-screen display, a Flash-based user interface, hot keys for launching TV as well as Internet and music, a full HTML web browser, microSD expansion slot. This also does GSM/EDGE and HSDPA, but no sign of UMTS.

The Ultra Video F500 has a dual-display multimedia handset with a 2.4-inch, 256k QVGA screen and a 1.5-inch, 176x220, 65k color secondary screen. It comes with a 2 megapixel camera. The F500 does your usual video codecs but adds in WMV and DivX to the mix. Music is handled by MP3/AAC/WMA/AC3 etc. It comes with a great 410mb of internal memory and a microSD slot is also present. It has a disappointing Bluetooth 1.2 and no UMTS, but tri-band GSM/EDGE and HSDPA cuts it.

The Ultra Video F510 is the same as the F500, but it also includes DVB-H, CBMS and CAS for receiving mobile TV broadcasts.

Finally, the Ultra Music F300 is a 9.4mm thin phone that comes with a digital power amp and supports MP3, AAC, WMA as well as WMDRM/MTP music download support, and MPEG4, H.263 video playback, though its not going to be a very pleasurable experience on its 2.1-inch, 176x220 resolution display. It is a dual-sided phone, called Dual Face, with a large screen and touch-sensitive key on one side, called Sweeping Touch UI, and a fully functional phone on the other side. It has stereo FM radio. Other features of the GSM/GPRS/EDGE capable phone include a 2.0-megapixel digital camera, Bluetooth with stereo A2DP support, fast USB 2.0 and 100 MB of phone memory with a microSD/TransFlash expansion slot going up to 2 GB.