Samsung and LG new card sized cell phones

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The two South Koreans companies several days apart presented their latest small cell phones or as they call it card (sized) phone. The market is heading toward cell phones with bigger screens but there is still a huge space for the niche of the card sized phones because they are really handy. You can easily put it on a pocket without having to worry about pressing them too much.

The first product announced was Samsung’s SGH-P310. It is the successor of the SGH-P300 that received good reviews when it came out one year ago. The new arrival has the same dimension of a credit card (86 x 54 x 8.5 mm) and supports the EDGE and GPRS networks.

The SGH-P310 comes also with a 2.0 Megapixel Camera that features flash and 4x zoom and is able to play music and video on a 1.9” 262K Color LCD. The supported formats are MPEG4 and H.263 while the audio formats are MP3, AAC and AAC+. As for the video it is the possibility to record video and store it on the 80MB internal memory expansible using the MicroSD slot.

The navigation is possible thanks to a touch sensor soft key. Other interesting features of the SGH-P310 are the support for Bluetooth 1.2 and USB 1.1 and a TV out.

LG replied with its credit card phone, the LG-SB610. Little details are known at this time but compared to the SGH-P310 it is a little thicker (10.95mm) but has a bigger screen (2.0 inch) and a DMB TV Tuner.

The latter feature lets the user watch TV and the quality should be acceptable thanks to the bigger display with a 170 degree view angle and the XD technology mastered by LG.

The latest difference between the two models is the areas where they will be distributed. The SGH-P310 will be available in these days in Europe and later in Asia while the LG card sized phone will be sold initially only in Korea. It is not clear when they will be available in the US though.