Picking up his jaw from the floor, Jørgen Sundgot eyes Samsung's new SGH-i300 smartphone at CeBIT, sporting a 3 GB hard drive and QVGA display.
Oh my, where to start. I'm rarely lost for words, but Samsung's new SGH-i300 is one of very few devices that have me tongue tied - to a certain degree, of course. Sure, one can argue that sticking so many features in a phone of any kind is bound to result in battery life so bad you'll be recharging the device twice a day - but let's face it, we all love it.
Powered by the Windows Mobile for smartphone platform, the SGH-i300 shown by Samsung at its stand was rigged not to allow exiting Windows Media Player 10 - possible reasons for which range from the software being a prototype, it running the next-generation and (for now) top secret Windows Mobile or quite simply Samsung wishing to focus on the multimedia capabiltities of the smartphone.
And what a multimedia device it is. Not only does the SGH-i300 offer a 262K colour QVGA resolution display of typical Samsung excellence, but it also contains a 3 GB hard drive for storing a vast amount of data; pictures taken with the 1.3 Megapixel camera with Flash come to mind, as do music in a veritable smorgasboard of supported formats.
Not content with WMA and WMV support, Samsung implemented support for MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 video formats, as well as MP3, AAC, AAC+ and even the relatively unknown Ogg Vorbis format. What's more, the handset itself contains dual speakers in addition to a digital audio out connector, and - believe it or not - the Bluetooth support of this über-smartphone also supports the use of stereo Bluetooth headsets.
With all of this in place, it's easy to forgive Samsung's only faux pas in creating the SGH-i300; the use of the TransFlash format for memory expansion. With a 3 GB hard drive, I know I'm not going to be using memory cards any time soon, but at least it's nice having the (proprietary and expensive) option. Oh, and if you're worried about how you're going to transfer data, fret not; the SGH-i300 is equipped with USB 2.0 connectivity.
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