Samsung E500 (SGH-E500)

Available now
22nd June 2006

Showing distinctly more bling than your usual Samsung, the SGH-E500 was originally announced last month, but it's now just about due to hit the market.

The Samsung E500 is being unashamedly marketed as a phone for women, with a selection of patterned designs and attractive detailing. Female-friendly looks are one thing, but the SGH-E500 even comes with an application where you can take a photograph of yourself and paste different hairstyles onto it, there's a calorie counter, biorhythm calculator and some other "girlie" applications too. In addition to this, the E500's screen doubles as a mirror.

Samsung say that the E500 is influenced by Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (the one with the nude woman standing the the seashell). Well, I suppose there's a clamshell in the painting.

Underneath all the shiny exterior is a pretty reasonable mobile phone, with a 176x220 pixel display in 262,000 colours, a 1.3 megapixel camera with flash, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 80Mb of internal memory. The Samsung E500 is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE. There's no expandable memory though, but overall the SGH-E500 isn't too bad in technical terms. And all of that fits into a handset weighing only 85 grams and measuring 85x44x20mm.

According to Samsung, the E500 should have started shipping in Russia in Q2 2006, followed by the rest of Europe.

The other Samsung SGH-E500

As a postscript.. this isn't the only phone to bear the "SGH-E500" name. Back in 2004, Samsung announced a different E500 model, also aimed at women. This was a dual-band GSM phone with a 128x128 pixel display and a VGA resolution camera that never made it to market (see the picture on the right). This has led to some confusion about the Samsung E500's status - but in fact the old E500 was cancelled, the new one should hit the market very soon.

 Subscribe to our newsletter for more news on upcoming releases