It may have been sunny in Barcelona for the 3GSM convention, but every phone seemed to be under the massive shadow cast by Apple's iPhone. Manufacturers hurried to show their newest touch-screen, slim, multimedia smartphones, and some piqued our interest more than others. Though many of these phones may never land on U.S. soil, they are a good indicator of where hardware and interface designs are going in the months to come.
Samsung didn't hesitate in jumping out of the starting gate early when they released their Ultra Smart F700 the week before the show began. Touch-screen phones have formed a new genre of smartphone devices, even before the Apple iPhone was released, and this Samsung phone, with its super-high-speed 7.2Mbps HSDPA networking and 5-megapixel camera, spares no expense in claiming the high end of smartphone features. We're curious about the interface, which Samsung hasn't described in detail, beyond its "drag and drop" capabilities.
Samsung also has us curious about their SGH-F520, a slider phone that opens in two directions to expose a numeric pad, or a full QWERTY keypad. The interface looks very cool, based on pictures we've seen, Otherwise, it looks like a pared-down version of the F700, with a 3-inch touchscreen and HSDPA support, but we appreciate innovation in design.
Motorola and Research in Motion both updated their business phone lines, with the Motorola Q q9 and the BlackBerry 8800. The q9 gets a more rounded look, as well as HSDPA, and a feature bump, bringing the camera to 2-megapixels. BlackBerry's 8800 borrows the Pearl's trackball and slim figure, making it the thinnest QWERTY BlackBerry phone.
Motorola also released the new RIZR Z8 slider phone, though we have yet to get our hands on the older RIZRs. With HSDPA networking, a 16-million color, QVGA screen, A2DP for stereo Bluetooth headphones, and support for the just-announced microSDHC 4GB expansion cards, the new RIZR takes multimedia seriously. The new curvy design isn't half bad looking, either.
What have we left out? We're skeptical about Neonode's ability to deliver the Neonode N2, a phone with an open source operating system, especially after the company's last touch-screen phone, the N1, saw numerous, mysterious delays. We weren't too impressed by Sony Ericsson's new high-end Walkman and Cyber Shot phones, the W880 and K810 respectively, which seem to be incremental upgrades to existing lines. Finally, the only phone generating more hype than the iPhone is the LG Prada phone, which was announced even before Apple's device.
Related phones: Our favorite phones from 3GSM 2007
Samsung's new touch screen, sliding-QWERTY smartphones
The new Motorola Q q9 gets HSDPA and a curvy new shell
BlackBerry adds a trackball to its slim new QWERTY phone
The MOTORIZR Z8 features a wealth of high-end media options
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