Real cameras have come to mobile super smartphones

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 16 October 2006 21:00

Your IT - Entertainment

While Nokia are releasing the fantastic looking 5 megapixel N95 super smart cameraphone in Q1 2007, Samsung have just released their first 10 megapixel cameraphone exclusively for the South Korean market. Is it a phone with a camera, or a camera with a phone?

Named the SCH-B600, it really does look like a fusion of credit card shaped digital camera, with 3x optical zoom (and camera style protruding lens) and a mobile phone. Previewed at the March 2006 CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, the phone has finally landed in South Korean stores, with no firm date for release in the rest of the world.

The camera part features 10 megapixels, a 3x optical zoom and a 5x digital zoom and is able to record QVGA (320x240) video at either 15 or 30 frames per second with a 16m colour 2.2-inch LCD screen. On the smartphone side of things, the phone has an mp3 player, a business card reader app to transcribe details of business cards photographed into the contacts list, and TV output for photos and videos. Whether this TV output also relates to web browsing on a TV (or other phone usage as is capable with selected Nokia phones) is unclear at this stage. Additional features include the ability to receive Satellite TV through a built in receiver.

This 10 megapixel model follows on from an 8 megapixel model launched in November 2005, and a 5 megapixel model launched in October 2004, and the only thing Samsung has to do now is to launch it worldwide! We’d love to see it available in local stores.

By contrast, Sony Ericsson and Nokia are only now offering 3.2 megapixel models, with the Sony Ericsson K800i offering a real flash to differentiate itself from the LED flashes used by most competitors, along with ‘Best-Shot’ technology to capture a series of images milliseconds apart so you can choose one, some or all of the resulting images, along with image stabilisation and other excellent features. Sony’s photoblogging feature is also fantastic, although we wish it worked with more than just Blogger, as it does for now. Unfortunately video is recorded at something like a sub 320x240 resolution, which is a shame considering the photo capabilities are so good. No doubt we’ll see improvements in the subsequent version. So, what about Nokia?