Samsung SPH-P9000

Expected H1 2007 (Korea)
19th November 2006

The Korean market is often a good pointer to the types of device that the rest of the world will see (usually much later), and the Samsung SPH-P9000 is the latest gadget announced by Samsung for their domestic market.

The SPH-P9000 is an EV-DO (3G CDMA) device with WiMAX (802.16) support, which means that the SPH-P9000 had high-speed data access wherever it can get a WiMAX or EV-DO signal.

It's a hefty beast, weighing 560 grams (1lb 2oz in old money), and it measures 143x92x30mm (5.6 x 3.5 x 1.2 inches). There's a novel folding keyboard, and the main display is a 5" 800x480 pixel unit, and there's a 1.3 megapixel camera facing the user. Internal storage consists of a 30Gb hard disk and the SGH-P9000 has Bluetooth too.

The keyboard folds up when not in use, so the SPH-P9000 can be used like a more traditional tablet PC.

Samsung say that the SPH-P9000 runs Windows XP, presumably the special Windows XP Tablet Edition used of UMPC ("Project Origami") devices. Samsung aren't touting the SPH-P9000 as a UMPC handheld, but the specification is close enough. The inclusion of WiMAX and EV-DO directly into the device is unusual though, and it adds to the SPH-P9000's desirability.

The Samsung SPH-P9000 does actually make voice calls, so to that extent it is also a mobile phone. But really, it's a handheld computer with integrated telephony and mobile network connections, rather than a device like the HTC Universal which is a scaled-up phone.

As it stands, the SPH-P9000 is a Korea-only device and it won't work in most other marketplaces where GSM and UMTS are the only network carriers. However, the WiMAX and EV-DO connectivity is only a small part of the overall technology in the SPH-P9000, so we could well be seeing devices like this in the rest of the world sometimg in 2007 or 2008.

Samsung say the the SPH-P9000 should be available in Korea during the first half of 2007. There is no word on any similar devices for non-Korean markets at present.

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