Samsung Monte Bar C3200

Available now
21st February 2010

The Samsung Monte Bar C3200 is a low-end midrange handset that is almost completely unrelated to the Monte S5620 touchscreen phone apart from a slight wedge shape and some minor functional crossover when it comes to the likes of social networking support.

The ridiculous brand-stretching of the "Monte" name overshadows that fact that the Monte Bar looks like a quite stylish and very lightweight device, which does at least look a little bit different from the competition.

Samsung say that the Monte Bar C3200 measures 112 x 47 x 13mm and weighs just 77 grams. Maximum talktime as quoted as being over 8 hours with up to 20 days standby time.

The C3200's multimedia player is complemented with a FM radio and 3.5mm audio socket, and as you might expect there's also a microSD slot. Although audio playback looks promising, the 2 megapixel camera on the back is very basic and the video capture resolution seems to cap out at a miserable 176 x 144 pixels at 15 frames per second.

This is a quad band GSM-only device, although it does support EDGE data which is at least something, as long as your network provider supports it. The Monte Bar also supports Bluetooth 2.1 and USB 2.0 connectivity.

We imagine that the Samsung Monte Bar C3200 will be aimed primarily at prepay customers, but Samsung had no guidance on price or availability at the time of going to press.