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Samsung's Big Push for 200415th April 2004 Samsung have been astonishingly busy revamping their entire range of handsets, recently announcing an almost completely new range at CeBIT. The new range shows a much better product spread than the old one, and there's a great deal of real innovation here. Samsung are clearly hungry for market share, and the 2004 range demonstrates this. These are some of the highlights of the new product range. Not all handsets will be available in all countries. With this range, Samsung are proving to be one of the most innovative phone makers of 2004, in our view battling it out with Siemens for the most promising manufacturer.
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An interesting Symbian based smartphone with a megapixel camera, with a sliding keypad now seen on some other Samsungs (borrowed from the Siemens SL55 perhaps). It's a powerful little device with good smartphone functions, video capture and a host of other goodies.
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A fairly basic clamshell phone, but one that's quite compact and reasonably light too. The E100's screen is probably the best in its class of low cost clamshells.
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One of the few recent annoucements that wasn't at CeBIT, the E400 is another compact clamshell pitched towards the lower end of the midrange market.
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A neat little camera phone that's more traditionally a Samsung in design terms. Samsung are likely to push the E600 on the versatility of the E600's VGA resolution camera.
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The E700, and its close derivatives the E710 and E715 were among the best selling phones of the last half of 2003. Samsung are committed to continuing with the E7xx series throughout most of 2004, and we don't blame them either. The E700 is one of our favourite phones.
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The closest thing we've seen to a successor to the excellent Siemens SL55, using the sliding handset available on some other Samsungs. A compact phone with bags of features.
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An upgrade of the E800 with a swivelling camera and video capture capabilities. A good phone for its small size, but frankly we think the E800 is cuter!
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Confusingly named with a similar Samsung i500 in the US, the SGH-i500 is a rare example of a PalmOS based smartphone. More that just a clever phone, this is one of the most advanced PalmOS devices anywhere, with improve software, handwriting recognition and a best-in-class digital camera.
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Another confusingly named device, the i700 has been around in various incarnations before, but this is based on the Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 operating system, making it a highly advanced and capable hybrid PDA/phone.
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Another hit of 2003, the P400 will continue into 2004 with it's trademark wacky swivelling trick. We think it will be retired sooner rather than later though, because the specification is beginning to look tired.
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A fairly straightforward VGA camera phone that sits in about the middle of the Samsung clamshell range. Another traditionally silver Samsung design.
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A rare EDGE capable device that's another typically silver Samsung. It also has the Samsung favourite of the swivelling camera. A nice phone, and one of the best (indeed the few) EDGE phones on the market.
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Cheekily, Samsung dub the P730 "megapixel class", even though by our count it only has 0.8 megapixels. Still, it has one of the best cameras and screens of any phone in its class, and it does this neat little twisting-rotating thing too. Cool.
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Not strictly a "new" phone, and not technically exciting. However, the X100 is hugely inexpensive and is very competitive in the lower/mid range candy bar market. Our verdict? It's a real Nokia killer - the X100 is both cheaper and better specified than many competing Nokias. Doesn't look too bad either.
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A really basic single screen clamshell phone, built down to a price but still with a reasonably good screen and a nice light weight too.
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Another not-quite-new phone, the X600 will continue into 2004. Unlike the elegant X100, we think the X600 looks very strange indeed, and a 128x128 pixel display really isn't good enough for a camera phone.
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