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Samsung spoils the Microsoft party with a Symbian phone

Right in the middle of Microsoft's mobility developer conference, Samsung has unveiled its first Symbian based smartphone.

The new SGH-D700 (as it is catchily known) is a Nokia Series 60 licence; it is a tri-band phone with a swivel screen and a digital camera.

This makes for the full set of three; Symbian, Palm, and Microsoft smartphones. "They are building one of everything, and then watching the market to see what happens," commented Gartner analyst Ben Wood, speaking at the MDC in Paris today.

The Palm OS-based SPH-i500 and SGH-i500 phones were launched in March, and the Microsoft Smartphone - the SPH-i600 - has been announced, but not shipping, for months. It still isn't shipping, but it was shown at CeBIT.

The Symbian SGH-D700 is scheduled for availability in Europe during the third quarter of 2003. It's a clamshell design, with "the first swivel screen seen on a smartphone," said the company.

The integrated digital camera is at VGA resolution (640X480 pixels) and like Nokia's own 3650 - another Series 60 phone - it has video messaging to let users exchange video clips through MMS and e-mail.

It can also play back streaming audio and video using a pre-installed RealOne software player.

Full MMS and POP3/IMAP4/SMTP e-mail support are on the feature list, as is a voice memo function; voice recognition for dialling names and carrying out certain commands; SyncML support (vCard, vCalendar); support for both MIDI and WAV files being used as ringtones; a WAP 2.0 browser; and vibration alert.

Another trait shared with the Nokia 3650 is the SGH-D700's MMC Card expansion slot which enables storage expansion. Users can transfer and play back MP3 files from both internal memory and an MMC storage card, but Samsung did not disclose whether a dedicated player is being used to play back audio or whether that functionality is provided by the RealOne player.

The SGH-D700 will be equipped with 4 MB of internal, non-volatile memory, and will come bundled with a handsfree set. Users will be able to synchronize information with Microsoft Outlook, but Samsung did not comment on whether this - as with Nokia's 7650 and 3650 models - will be limited to Calendar and Contacts information.

The SGH-D700 also supports USB connectivity. That's fast: compared with speeds achieved by Infrared and Bluetooth, synchronization of particularly large files can be expected to be require far less time.