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Even though an Android powered Samsung has been in the works for a few months, it looks like Samsung just set the land speed record for rumor to fact in, what seems to be, less than a day. She’s slim, she’s sexy, she has no keyboard and she’s heading for “major European countries from June, 2009”.
So let’s break it down:
- Quad-Band GSM
- Tri-Band HSDPA (900/1700/2100MHZ) Score one for TMo U.S.!
- 3.2′ AMOLED Screen
- WiFi
- GPS
- 5 MP Camera w/ Flash
- 1,500mAh battery (ie better battery life than your crappy stock G1)
- 8GB Internal Storage, Complimented with Expandable MicroSD
- 3.5mm Headset Jack
Full Press Release:
April 27, 2009, Seoul, Korea – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today unveiled the I7500, its first Android-powered mobile phone. With a launch of I7500, Samsung became the first company among the global top three mobile phone manufacturers to unveil an Android-powered phone.
“Samsung is among the earliest members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving forward to introduce the most innovative Android mobile phone,” said JK Shin, Executive Vice President and Head of Mobile Communication Division in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industry and our consistent strategy to support every existing operating system, I believe that Samsung provides the better choices and benefits to our consumers” he added.
The Samsung I7500 is a cutting-edge smartphone, featuring a 3.2″ AMOLED full touch screen and 7.2Mbps HSDPA and WiFi connectivity, giving users access to Google™ Mobile services and full web browsing at blazing speeds.
The Samsung I7500 offers users access to the full suite of Google services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Calendar™, and Google Talk™. The integrated GPS receiver enables the comprehensive use of Google Maps features, such as My Location, Google Latitude, Street View, local search and detailed route description. Hundreds of other applications are available in Android Market. For example, the application Wikitude, a mobile travel guide, allows consumers to access details of unknown sights via location-based Wikipedia articles.
Based on Samsung’s proven product leadership, Samsung I7500 comes with latest multimedia features. The large and vivid 3.2″AMOLED display ensures the brilliant representation of multimedia content and enjoyable full touch mobile experience. Along with supporting a 5-megapixel camera and various multimedia codec formats, the I7500 also provides a long enough battery life (1500mAh) and generous memory capacity up to 40GB (Internal memory: 8GB, External memory: Up to 32GB) to enjoy all the applications and multimedia content. The phone also boasts its slim and compact design with mere 11.9mm thickness.
The Samsung I7500 will be available in major European countries from June, 2009.
[via Engadget]
Looks cool. I’m afraid that the touch screen will be resistive though. Come on samsung.
From what this news article says it is a HVGA OLED capacitive touch screen.
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/340/C17205/
Will this phone be able to run in America and Canada, assuming it is unlockable?
That’s the thing, the general concensus is that it will because the 3g utilizes the 1700 band, but there is something about the situation that people are forgetting or not knowing. T-mobile utilizes a modified 1700 band (it actually falls within a sub spectrum), it’s not the standard 1700 band. If you were to nab a different phone from EU that has the 1700 3G band, it wouldn’t work on T-mobile US. The Edge will of course work because this phone is quad band, and the band that T-mobile uses for Edge (1850) falls within the bands that the phone utilizes. I think people might be setting themselves up for disappointment in thinking this phone would be 3g capable on T-mobile USA’s 3g network, unless of course the 1700 band this phone uses is the modified 1700 band that T-mobile USA uses. The chances of that are unlikely though, as this phone’s release area is EU, and the 1700 band is quite common in EU territories.
I still think the HTC Touch Pro2 is going to be kicking all asses. Hope that they will release an Android version too otherwise I will have to try to do the upgrade myself somehow.
HTc touch pro -> MS 6.x sadly…. don’t think that htc will leave ms so quickly…. shitty…
Still waiting to prolong my subscription at vodafone holland… BUt I think i switch to a prepaid thing during the summer… I can manage hahaha. I think in sep 09 more phones will coming… If not I switch to the newest iphone by then… I reasonable prices in holland….
What… no Bluetooth?
Wouldn’t it be an option to buy a HTC Touch Pro2 and just install Android on it manually?
Booting Android from within WM on my HTC Kaiser runs pretty smooth already so I’m hoping some geeks will make sure an Android Touch Pro2 will be an option.
Otherwise I’ll just buy a cheap ass second phone that runs Android natively, just to do some Android software development.