There's a lot to like about the new Samsung S8300, the Korean manufacturer's new multimedia phone for the masses. This is a sleek touchscreen phone with a slide-out numeric keypad, measuring only 110 by 51.5 by 12.7 mm. The Samsung S8300 simply combines the ultra-thin shape of the past with a touchscreen interface, hence it's the first phone in a new Samsung product line dubbed UltraTouch. We expect to see many phones of this kind coming out of Samsung's headquarters in the future, but let's take a closer look at what we have now.
The first thing you'll notice is the Samsung S8300's Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED) display, offering a 2.8" screen showing 16 million colors at a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels (Wide-QVGA). If it hadn't been for the new LG Arena's Wide-VGA screen boasting an 800 x 480 pixels resolution, it would easily have been a screen to beat this spring. Still, it's nice to see Samsung opting for a large screen with AMOLED technology in a mass market phone.
The Samsung S8300 also offers another welcome upgrade, as the phone comes with the next version of TouchWIZ featuring 3D graphics. In addition to providing a touch interface throughout the phone, it also manages Widgets. In the previous version, TouchWIZ only came with a selection of preloaded Widgets, but users will now be able to download Widgets on their own.
The Samsung S8300 comes with extensive video playback support, promising to play file formats such as DivX, XviD, H.263, H.264, WMV9 and MPEG4. In other words, if you take your time to convert your movies to 240 x 400 pixels, you could put the phone's screen to good use. Sadly, the Samsung S8300 only comes with an internal memory of 80MB, but a microSDHC memory slot supporting up to 16GB cards has been squeezed into the slim body. The phone also supports Bluetooth 2.1 and USB 2.0.
One important question that'll remain unanswered until we give the Samsung S8300 a real test though, is its 8-megapixel CMOS camera with Dual Power LED. The camera will take advantage of auto focus, face detection, smile recognition and Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), but it's impossible to predict the image quality coming out of it. As an added bonus, the Samsung S8300 also records VGA clips at 30 fps. Photos can also be geo-tagged, and a new photo blogging widget will come preloaded.
The Samsung S8300 will be released in Europe in Q2 2009, though specific countries and price has yet to be announced. Since the phone offers Quad-band GSM support, it will work on AT&T and T-Mobile's GSM networks, but the 7.2 Mbps HSDPA support is for European networks only.
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