Samsung's F300 and F500 Ultra phones
Samsung -- the company for which no phone is too thin or too small -- used ITU Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong as an opportunity to announce (among other things) a couple new multimedia powerhouses that are both thin and small. The F300 (alias "Flipper," perhaps) is a music-oriented handset that looks like an ordinary MP3 player on one side and a diminutive phone on the other, rocking 100MB of internal storage with microSD expansion up to 2GB, a 220 x 176 display, 2 megapixel cam, FM radio, Bluetooth with A2DP, and a triband GSM radio with EDGE all crammed into a 9.4 millimeter shell. The F500 is more sufficiently equipped for the heavy lifting that comes with video duty, directly supporting DivX on its 2.4-inch QVGA display. Like its F300 little sibling, it features dual faces -- one for phone, one for fun -- but packs a more aggressive 400MB of memory (in addition to whatever you manage to add via microSD). It also adds UMTS and a nifty swivel that allows the phone to be placed upright on a surface for video use, though all the added goodies add a full 1.3 millimeters over the F300's thickness. It's not clear when either device will hit store shelves, but in light of Samsung's little "oopsie" with their CES press release, we're hoping to hear more in the next month or so.
[Thanks, Jason K.]
Read - F300 Ultra Music
Read - F500 Ultra Video
