Samsung touts 3GB mobile
Blurs lines between phones and digital Walkmans.
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service | Published: 11:24, 10 March 2005
Samsung is demonstrating its new Windows Mobile and hard-disk drive mobile phone at Cebit in Hanover.
The SGH-I300 has 3GB storage - considerably more than anything else on the market - and is Samsung's second phone to feature a hard-drive. The first phone, the SPH-V5400, was released in September with 1.5GB of space and was a world-first.
Putting a hard-disk into a cell phone hadn't been possible until the new generation of compact, one-inch drives with low power consumption came onto the market. The drives in the Samsung phones are similar to those used in some portable digital music players, such as the iPod Mini.
"It's a logical extension to add an MP3 player to a cell phone," said Christian Collins, senior manager at Samsung's mobile phone overseas marketing group, in an interview in Seoul last week. "The key is more memory and with a hard-disk drive it's easier to do music."
Unlike the previous phone, which was aimed at the South Korean market, the new phone is based on GSM. The tri-band phone features a 1.3 megapixel camera and support for a host of video and audio standards.
Users can store multimedia files on the phone's hard-disk drive for playback on the device or use the storage space as a portable hard-disk for any type of file, said Samsung. It supports Bluetooth, IrDA infrared and USB connections. It measures 113mm by 48mm by 20mm and weighs 130 grams.
No launch date or price for the handset has been decided, said a spokeswoman.
