Samsung's touchscreen-based SGH-P520 gets legit

First comes the FCC leak, then comes a hunch, and just as fate would have it, now it's time to celebrate the fact that Samsung's SGH-P520 is apparently a tad more than a figment of one's imagination. Reportedly, this sexy handset will indeed be making its way onto store shelves, and rather than featuring an oh-so-typical keypad, users will rely solely on a touchscreen to navigate the GUI. Specs wise, it will boast a 2.6-inch 320 x 240 resolution LCD, GSM / EDGE connectivity, a three-megapixel camera, 50MB of internal memory, Bluetooth / WiFi, and a microSD card slot to boot. No word just yet on pricing nor availability, but do click on for one last shot.

[Via Clubic]

[Jeff Lewis @ Jul 24th 2007 3:02PM]

Yeah, but it's no iPhone...

Seriously though, that's very nice looking. I like the slipcase, makes it look very posh.

I wonder what OS is on it? WM6 or Symbian?

[yoinkers @ Jul 24th 2007 4:20PM]

No, it's not an iPhone and frankly I think mobile phone companies are getting it all wrong.

The iPhone touch screen is not the thing to emulate and frankly touch screens suck for the reasons already outlined here on engadget. The thing they should be copying is an intuitive, ergonomic software/hardware interface.

We'll all benefit if they start doing that and I don't think they should be shamed for trying. Blatant ripoffs suck but I'd still accept that over my Treo700p's antiquated interface.

Say what you will about apple or the iPhone but we'll all benefit from a new round of UIs.

[loci @ Jul 25th 2007 7:24AM]

Jeff Lewis...apples fav i.clone pet

good doggy, heres a biscuit...now go away you i.drone

[thudson @ Aug 23rd 2007 3:52PM]

Many of the other commenters are speaking the truth. It's not even the same size of rectangle as the iPhone. Cellphone design trends are heading towards full-screen, touchscreen and thin. Following trends != copying.

--Travis Hudson, MWW Group on behalf of Samsung

[peshue @ Jul 24th 2007 3:04PM]

Oh no, it's rectangular and has a touch screen. It must be a iphone knock off.

[Jay @ Jul 24th 2007 3:52PM]

LG Prada

[Dave @ Jul 24th 2007 3:20PM]

Odd, but the edge-on photo appears to be upside-down compared to the face-on picture next to it.
The photos also show screws, so it'll be a step behind his-jobsness in terms of build quality.

[Erik @ Jul 24th 2007 5:42PM]

Build quality? I think you mean aesthetic quality.

But I still disagree with you. That's a pretty sweet device.

The screws mean you are allowed to open it, unlike pretty much everything Apple makes.

[kjb434 @ Jul 24th 2007 3:22PM]

Truthfully, a lot of phone makers have been working on iPhone like devices for a good while. HTC is releasing theirs hopefully near the holidays. It'll be fun to see the iPhone functionality mated with a more open operating system like WM6.

This Samsung will have to be ATT or TMobile since it is GSM/EDGE based.

[Sparks @ Jul 24th 2007 5:03PM]

Honestly, the thing about the iPhone that makes it particularly interesting is not the touchscreen interface. Not even the multi-touch or the orientation detection (though, after playing with the iPhone's version of Safari, Opera Mobile feels limiting).

The thing about the iPhone that's made me start taking it more seriously as something /new/ in phones is that it is a /phone/. That sounds a little redundant, I know, but it's actually a huge thing.

Windows Mobile is trying -- and succeeding -- at being an anemic little handheld computer. It wants to be a computer like your desktop or laptop; you install software, you update, and so on. This is great, and it gives you a whole lot of power. BUT those PDAs tend to be PDAs first and foremost... understandably, as smartphones came along much later in WinCE/Windows Mobile development. Speaking as someone who has gone through the HTC Wallaby, then HTC Blueangel and then the HTC Wizard... the Windows Mobile phone app feels glued on. It is a phone program running on a little computer. It's just Yet One More Program on your phone.

In contrast, after having a chance to play with one for about two weeks, I'm pretty convinced that the iPhone is trying to be a phone rather than a computer. It is an undeniably *fancy* phone, as it lets you slurp down information (maps/addresses/directions, stock, weather, etc.), but it is still first and foremost a phone. This means it's not as flexible as one of the Windows Mobile devices as a portable COMPUTER, but it can be a better PHONE.

(I recognize that under the hood it /is/ another little computer, running a super-scaled-down OS X, but that is /not/ how it is presented to the end-user. And that's the important factor here.)

To use another analogy, from a usability standpoint it's like using the cordless phone that's sitting on your desk, versus using the Skype client software on your desktop computer. Both will get you to the same place -- calling someone -- and the desktop computer software has more power and options (instant messaging, find contacts, video chat, etc.). But the cordless phone is still /simpler, hence the increasing number of Skype handsets which basically act like cordless phones.

I completely agree that the iPhone's UI is not what people should be copying; it's pretty and all, but no, it's not necessarily all that revolutionary. The fact that it is an extremely functional phone is what should be copied; phones have been losing sight of being phones, and the revolutionary part -- though it pains me to agree it should count as 'revolutionary' -- is making the phone the center of the platform.

Windows Mobile's openness is great for extensibility, but the phone functionality needs some polish; that's what they need to take away from the iPhone Frenzy.

[brendan Sheehan jnr @ Jul 24th 2007 8:52PM]

Great post Sparks, but I have to disagree with this part:

"Honestly, the thing about the iPhone that makes it particularly interesting is not the touchscreen interface. Not even the multi-touch or the orientation detection.."

The UI and the multi-touch hi-res glass touch screen being the only real form of navigation on the device enable the device to be anything. Sure your whole phone point makes perfect sense, as most of us already knows, most phones are shit. The iPhone is not. But this has shown us that touch screen is the future, cause you can add buttons, features and make changes via software. The fact that the user interface is a screen gives free rain to the Apple software engineers to make this thing be what they what it to be, saying that isn't important is missing the point.

P.S. If you want a phone that's a phone, the why bother ever getting a Smartphone? Otherwise good post though.

[Mike @ Jul 24th 2007 3:30PM]

Samsung is a disappointing company at times, at least where cellphones and MP3 players are concerned. They excel in assembling small electonic gadgets, but they don't seem to be an innovator. Many Samsung products are simply clones of various Motorola cellphones. Their MP3 players have often aped iPod designs. I've yet to see an original Samsung design that the rest of the industry has rushed to copy. Secondly, based on my experiences with my girlfriend's Samsung cellphone, Samsung would do well to concentrate far more on usability testing than design copying. Answering a 2nd inbound call and switching back to the first call, or switching calls back and forth between the handset and a Bluetooth headset, are not always intuitive tasks with Samsungs products.

Spec-wise, this looks like a nice piece of hardware compared to the iPhone, but if it simply runs a variant of Windows Mobile, that can hardly be considered revolutionary. Also, of those 50 MB or ram, how much of that is used for the OS?

[joe @ Jul 24th 2007 5:54PM]

no, no, no. that's the samsung of old. they used to make boring silver clam shells only, but look at their recent products. you can see they are trying untraditional stuff all the time. i have to say, samsung makes the most unique design recently. no other phone company makes sexy slider's like samsung. go check u700 ultra, and check out there 10meg phone cameras. also check out g600. also products like f300, f500, f510, g600, f200, and etc. almost all of them are unique and nothing like others. IMO, samsung has the best design right now, some sucks, but at least they are trying to come up with new ideas.

[thudson @ Aug 23rd 2007 3:35PM]

Samsung is actually one of the leading innovators in the mobile phone market and have many awards to prove it. Some example of industry first include the first phone with an MP3 player (Uproar), the first GPS-capable phone (N300), the first phone with changeable faceplates (a310), the first phone with a full-color display (a500), first cameraphone (v205) and even the first slider with the d415 -- just to name a few of the industry firsts. The Upstage is definitely different than anything else out there.

--Travis Hudson, MWW Group on behalf of Samsung

[Darnell @ Jul 24th 2007 3:33PM]

It looks great but a 2.6in screen is waaaay to small for touch-screen only.

[Homeboy @ Jul 24th 2007 3:56PM]

Looks like an attractive device. I would love to see it over here in Europe. What I love about it is that it has tactile Yes/No buttons, which is something I would like to see on all future. The screen size seem to be decent and if it cost less than 500 euro/dollars I might look into it.

The lack of 8GB fixed memory doesn't bother me because it keeps the price down, which is perfect for people like me who carry around 30gb DAPs, Further more a 4gb microSD card barely cost 50 euro/dollars which makes it very cheap to upgrade the phone with more memory.

[ug @ Jul 24th 2007 4:03PM]

When was the first VGA pda? Over 5 years ago, right? Why can't we move onto VGA already? Web browsing sucks on these things. Even the iPod has only a PSP-style res, not full VGA.

[Kevlar @ Jul 24th 2007 4:13PM]

Why not VGA? For two reasons. The first, and most prohibitive, is that it's DAMN expensive. Suddenly your $299 Smartphone becomes a $399 smartphone. The second reason is if the physical screen size remains the same, but the resolution doubles, text is going to become twice as small, and twice as hard to read. You could enlarge the text, but that would make web-browsing just as impractical as it is currently.

If you feel like offering a solution to either these problems, me, the company I work for, and it's investors are all ears!

[ug @ Jul 24th 2007 4:17PM]

==
Why not VGA? For two reasons. The first, and most prohibitive, is that it's DAMN expensive.
==

Why is it still so expensive after all these years? Where is Moore's law? The densite of LCD panels on laptops keeps going up. Now you can get 1080P panels on laptops. The dpi on that must be the same if not greater than a VGA smartphone. If VGA was so hard to read at that size then nobody would have ever put a VGA screen on them.

[MasterCKO @ Jul 24th 2007 4:46PM]

I think that you're missing the point. The two problems that he mentioned are interconnected. Since there aren't any really great benefits for a VGA rez over QVGA in a phone sized screen (which really, there aren't), the significant extra price for making them and installing them in phones is not worth it (manufacturers can essentially crap out QVGA screens).

Also, I believe that higher rez screens need more power to display. I think that battery tech is lagging behind the rest of mobile tech enough that we shouldn't exasperate the problem with widespread adoption of VGA screens in smartphones if it can be avoided.

[DaMaDo @ Jul 24th 2007 9:39PM]

The problem is battery technology is holding up most mobile technology advancements.
Get a breakthrough in battery tech and you'll see a whole slew of cool new features included..and all new items.

[Xzavier @ Jul 24th 2007 4:42PM]

ok... I am only going to say this ONCE! It's not an iPhone nor is it an iPhone Knock-off!

[joseph chung @ Jul 24th 2007 5:55PM]

and stop saying this is a iphone knock off. samsung already made f520, which is a touch screen plus the qwerty.

[minimalist @ Jul 24th 2007 8:00PM]

"Say what you will about apple or the iPhone but we'll all benefit from a new round of UIs."

Unfortunately the fugly, half-assed all-in-one iMac knock offs that Dell, Gateway, etc put out a few years ago are the more likely outcome. These companies mistakenly thought the iMac's popularity was all about its looks (and then they couldn't even get THAT part right which is pretty shameful). I suspect the only thing that will result from the iPhone is badly executed copy cat industrial design. The UI not something most manufacturers are willing to put the time and effort into because its an intangible.

The reason Apple puts the time and effort into UI design is because Jobs demands it. He may be a controlling jerk that is easy to hate on, but he is a true believer in the value good design (and I'm talking about design in its largest sense, not just about shiny pretty things)

Until the other phone manufacturers break out of the "more is more" mindset I don;t think we will see anybody do a radical rethink of cell phone UI's. Look at the RAZ, sexy design slapped on the pokiest, most clumsy UI ever. Instead of loading these devices with 200 things done adequately, how about doing just 20 things really well?

[Andrew @ Jul 24th 2007 8:34PM]

According to the Korean press, this is an "Armani" branded phone. Seems like the main competitor to the Prada phone.

[derek @ Jul 25th 2007 12:45AM]

FINALLY...a suitable replacement for my sph500 clamshell

[Dorian Smith @ Jul 25th 2007 1:10PM]

reminds me of the iriver clix

[quasio @ Jul 26th 2007 1:31AM]

Im amazed at how quick samsung pumps out phones. i mean i remember the razor, and only 2-4 months later it came out with an equivalent and took some market. same with LG prada/iphone equivalent.. same with PDA type ones.. Q etc.. its amazing..
camera phones with big HD's.. awesome.. i mean that's why they are 2nd now..

in the end with phones, everyone wants alternatives, and that's what samsung is providing.. copy or not, it doesn't matter nearly all mobile phone users are brand aware, so the one they buy is the one they pick and can afford.

[ben @ Jul 27th 2007 5:27AM]

looks to me like my current phone, the samsung p 300 updated. who cares that it bares a resemblance to an iphone - i could draw a rectangular box that does. hopefully they have removed the internet links that plagued the recently release ultra models here in the UK. i reckon this will be my next phone if they do it all right.