There's more than one Symbian OS smartphone in the works from Samsung: Jørgen Sundgot gets to play with the SGH-D720's little known sibling, the SGH-D730.
Ah, Symbian OS smartphones from Samsung; a topic I've previously
ranted on in length. Quickly summarized, I'm frustrated with the company's inability to bring to market beautifully designed, fully featured devices which would have brought some much-needed style to this particular segment. The
SGH-D700 and
SGH-D710 have already been canned, and as you can tell from my preview of the
SGH-D720 it's not nearly as far ahead of the pack as the two previously mentioned models were at the time of their unveiling.
Surprisingly, however, the SGH-D720 isn't Samsung's only crack at a Symbian OS smartphone this year. Drowning in the flood of other phones shown by the manufacturer at the 3GSM World Congress and CeBIT is the SGH-D730, a clamshell Series 60 based smartphone that offers a feature set virtually identical to the SGH-D720, albeit in a more conservative package.
 | | Samsung SGH-D730 |
GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz makes up the base connectivity for the handset, which is equipped with dual displays: an internal 262K colour TFT display at 176 x 208 pixels, and an external - also TFT - 65K colour one at 96 x 96 pixels. As has been the case with all other Samsung smartphones, both are excellent - but other manufacturers are catching up quickly in this area.
Moving on, we find extensive imaging capabilities with an 1 Megapixel camera with built-in Flash and 4x digital zoom, capable of both shooting stills in JPEG format and recording video in MPEG4. Video streaming is also possible, however with GPRS they could just has well left such a feature out. Perhaps more of interest is the ability to play back MP3 tunes, which is delivered courtesy of the RealOne Player which naturally also supports Real audio and video formats.
 | | Samsung SGH-D730 |
Continuing in the audio department, we find 64-chord polyphonic ringtones and a 'music composer'; unfortunately, the sample I toyed with didn't appear to have this particular application installed, so I'm at a loss when asked to describe it. What I can tell you, however, is that the SGH-D730 offers all the usual Series 60 applications, including support for SyncML, e-mail and Wireless Village based instant messaging, and also features some sort of 'Intelligent Agent System' which I have yet to find a Samsung representative capable of explaining.
For connectivity, the SGH-D730 is equipped with Bluetooth and USB, as well as a MMCmicro card expansion slot, the latter of which I don't care particularly for as a card can easily go missing if you sneeze too hard. No, really. Regardless, the mediocre SGH-D730 may or may not make it to shelves, and may not feature a high-end price tag since nobody in their right mind will touch this thing if they can't get it for cheap.
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