Camera Phones Plaza

Samsung Highnote, one of the latest additions to Sprint high-end cell phone line, is to be launched together with the Samsung Rant, considered to be the Best Cell Phone at this year’s CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Conference, both featuring the innovative One Click user interface with customizable menus, awarded as the Best Overall Product at CTIA 2008.

Unlike Rant, which is optimized for intensive texting, Highnote comes with cool and powerful music features, and a distinctive one is the sliding stereo speaker at the top of the handset.
It is actually a dual-slider cell phone, revealing the speaker at the top and a dial pad at the bottom, while colored in blue or red.

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Enabled with Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Network it provides high-speed Internet connectivity for web browsing and downloads over-the-air, while the telecommunication network gives the user access to its Sprint Music Store, Sprint Navigation and other useful services.



There is a built-in 2MP camera with video recording capability and night shot mode, so you to be able to capture images on the go and record funny moments, as well as a 3.5-mm headphone jack, stereo Bluetooth technology with audible caller ID, up to 8GB memory, and speaker-independent voice recognition.

Samsung Highnote dual-slider cell phone measures 1.9 x 4 x 0.6 inches at 3.5 ounces and powers from a standard Li-Ion battery for up to 5.6 hours of continuous talk time. It sports a 2-inch TFT display with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels and 262K colors, on which you can manage different productivity applications including turn-by-turn directions, 10 million points of interest to browse through, Live Search for directory information and interactive maps, Wireless Backup for your contacts information, and others.



It is mainly a music phone, so it comes first with an advanced music player capability, allowing you to browse the web and compose messages while listening to the background music. Next it gives you access to 150 radio channels and to Sprint’s Music Store with tons of songs available for purchase and download at a price of 99 cents each.

CTIA Wireless is a non-profit organization representing all the wireless communication fields including cellular, personal communication services and enhanced specialized mobile radio.
This year at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Conference, Sprint had a big success with its latest cell phone releases, winning 2 prestigious awards. Sprint One Click user interface won Best Overall Product at CTIA, while Samsung Rant received the Best Cell Phone at CTIA Award.



What is One Click? –It’s a new user interface provided by Sprint on its cell phones, featuring easy navigation and characteristics found usually in smartphones. The interface has customizable home screen and content such as text messaging, Google search, Sprint Navigation, email, favorite Web sites, music, and call log. In addition, users can add shortcuts to their favorite websites to access them in one-click directly from the home screen. The menu has a carousel style and you can scroll through the applications reading instant information about each feature available.

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According to Sprint, this interesting user interface which you’ll see in the following video posted on YouTube by PhoneScoop, is available on 3 phones: Samsung Rant awarded as Best Cell Phone, Samsung Highnote and LG Lotus, a cool cell phone we wrote about a few days ago.

Awards were decided based on the following criteria: top forward-thinking devices, applications and services with innovative design and utility, capable to enhance communication for customers and business users.
Sprint will add One Click on Sanyo Katana Eclipse later this fall.



"Proving that you don't need a smartphone to have a smart interface, Sprint's new One Click menu system makes it dead simple to access everything from your text messages and e-mail to Sprint's navigation and music services," wrote Mark Spoonauer, LAPTOP editor-in-chief. "We love the carousel-style UI, and that you don't have to dig through sub-menus to get what you want, including You Tube. The UI not only saves time, it will encourage Sprint customers to take full advantage of all the carrier's services, making the Simply Everything plan that much sweeter."



The award-winning Samsung Rant as Best Cell Phone sports a side-sliding full QWERTY keyboard, access to Sprint Navigation, Sprint Music Store and Sprint TV, and features a built-in 2MP camera with video recording, stereo Bluetooth, up to 8GB memory, voice recognition, Sprint Picture Mail, background music mode, audio caller ID, email, web browsing and instant messaging.



It is a practical handset coming in black or red, measuring 4.5 x 2.1 x 0.7 inches at 4.58 ounces, sporting a 2.1-inch TFT display of 262K colors, and providing up to 5.6 hours of talk time.
It will be available in October at Sprint for $49.99 with a 2-year contract and a $50 mail-in rebate.

During New York City Fashion Week, the fashion designer Christian Siriano, known as the winner of season IV of the Project Runway reality show, unveiled an elegant scarf designed especially for the new LG Lotus cool cell phone that you see in these nice images. The partnership with LG Mobile resulted in a unique designer cell phone with powerful features including multimedia applications. Coming in textured purple and satin black, LG Lotus fashionable phone won a Red Dot Design Award for its original look. Even if it comes in a small form factor, it has a QWERTY keyboard for intensive typing supporting email, Instant Messaging and other communication tools.



"Fashion is so important because it helps convey individual personalities," said Ehtisham Rabbani, vice president of product strategy & marketing for LG Mobile Phones. "Similarly, we believe mobile phones have the same ability and have become a fashion accessory within their own right. We are very excited to partner with Christian Siriano and look forward to seeing his unique accessory inspired by the LG Lotus on the runway at Fashion Week."

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The accessory I was telling you about is a pewter grey silk jersey scarf, and Siriano likes to say: "The scarf I designed for the new LG Lotus is absolutely fabulous and is the ultimate accessory to what I consider the accessory you can't leave home without – your mobile phone. I based my concept for the scarf on the Lotus' unique square shape. The scarf absolutely reflects my vision as a designer and I hope this sparks a trend of wearing your phone in a more fashionable way."



Now let’s see the other features of LG Lotus, a cool cell phone that will be available exclusively at Sprint with Sprint Navigation for GPS-enabled turn-by-turn directions and 10 million points of interest, Sprint TV, Sprint Radio, Sprint Music Store access and others.



The clamshell integrates stereo Bluetooth, a built-in 2MP camera with camcorder functionality, Wireless Backup saving contact list in case the handset is lost or stolen, music player with external controls, microSD card slot for up to 12GB storage capacity, background music playback support while surfing the web, SMS Voice, access to corporate and customer email, and a 900mAh battery providing up to 5.5 hours of talk time.
LG Lotus’ external display measures 2.1 inches and it’s a TFT of 65K colors, with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels, enough to clearly display incoming calls and message alerts, while the main display is a 2.4-inch TFT of 262K colors and 240 x 320 pixels.

Details about price and availability were not made public yet by the telecommunication company.

By the end of this year, if you’ll be one of Sprint’s customers, you’ll have the chance to get the new BlackBerry Curve 8350i phone with built-in Wi-Fi module and Group Connect capability that allows you to start instant conversations with up to 21 subscribers simultaneously, via Push-to-Talk.

"Smart phones in general, and BlackBerry products in particular, have become more important to both business people and consumers lately," said David Chamberlain, Principal Analyst with analyst firm In-Stat. "The BlackBerry Curve 8350i with PTT capability rounds out Sprint's options to fill communications needs of many industries particularly those in the blue-collar segment of construction, field services, transportation and manufacturing."

Sprint will announce the price and exact availability date for the new BlackBerry phone later this year, but from the press release we found out about all its features, so let’s see which they are.

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First of all, BlackBerry Curve 8350i uses the iDEN technology developed by no other than Motorola, the inventor of cell phones. This technology enabled trunked radio and cellular telephone, gathering several users in a spectral space, in a larger number compared to 2-way radio systems. This is done via a speech compression method and Time Division Multiple Access standard.
In addition to iDEN, the new BlackBerry phone works with the Nextel Direct Connect push-to-talk service, so you to be able to get in contact with multiple users at the same time.



"Sprint is the undisputed leader in push-to-talk services, and with the launch of the new BlackBerry Curve 8350i smartphone, we are keeping our promise of expanding the Nextel Direct Connect capabilities and options for our customers," said Danny Bowman, president of Nextel Direct Connect. "The BlackBerry Curve 8350i will be very attractive for business customers who need instant, convenient push-to-talk services to communicate now with employees, customers and suppliers but also want the capabilities of a high-end smartphone."

Like all the other models, the new BlackBerry phone, Curve 8350i, features multimedia player, wireless connectivity, Internet browsing, email, Instant Messaging, multi-tasking, GPS, A-GPS, a built-in 2MP camera with 5x digital zoom, slash and video recording, as well as Office document management, speakerphone, microSD memory slot, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile, and a 1400mAh battery for long talk time.

The latest Samsung phones released are available exclusively for Sprint’s customers at affordable costs, together with the 2-year contract and basic functionalities like the other mid-level handsets introduced recently.
Samsung M320 and Samsung M220 have an attractive overall look and a flip design with rounded edges, while the color combinations are dark red/black and dark blue/black respectively, with a glossy finish.

The main difference between the two, besides color, is the fact that Samsung M320 has a built-in camera while the M220 hasn’t. Through, M320 has a price of $19.99 and the M220 costs with $10 more. To explain this opposite difference let’s see what the other phones’ features are.

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Both provide Internet access, speakerphone, Bluetooth technology for wireless transfers in short ranges, voice messaging, and support downloadable games, voice-activated dialing, ring tones and screensavers, as well as Picture Caller ID.



You can use both to connect to Sprint Vision, backup the 300-entries contact lists using Wireless Backup feature, send and receive emails, set to-do lists, and record 10 voice memos of up to 60 seconds each.
The incoming call and messaging alerts are displayed on a 96 x 96 CSTN display of 65K colors.



One difference starts with the internal TFT display on which you can browse web pages and check the latest pictures received via Bluetooth, which on the M220 measures 1.25 x 1.57 inches, the entire handset weighting 2.68 ounces at 3.6 x 1.9 x 0.7 inches dimension, while the M320 has a 1.10 x 1.38-inch screen and measures 3.5 x 1.9 x 0.8 inches at 3.1 ounces. Dimension difference is small compared to the additional functionality brought by M320, which comes with the digital VGA camera having a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, Sprint PCS Picture MailSM, and the PictBridge support to allow you to connect the cell phone to a compatible printer and print your photos.



Another difference is the battery life. Samsung M320 uses a standard Li-Ion battery offering up to 3.5 hours of talk time, while the M220’s battery lasts up to 4.4 hours of continuous talk time.

I believe that the final decision of which to choose depends upon your color taste and the need for an entry-level camera.