Samsung iPhone rival to hit UK in November
Vodafone gets the gig
Samsung's would-be iPhone beater, the F700 smartphone - aka the Croix - will come to Europe in two months' time through the Vodafone network, the company revealed today.
The Ultra Smart F700, launched back in February this year, sports an iPhone-esque, Flash-based user interface and an HTC-style casing, complete with big, 3.2in display and slide-out Qwerty micro-keyboard. Unlike HTC handsets, the Samsung lacks Wi-Fi, but it does have Bluetooth.
Samsung's Ultra Smart F700: coming via Vodafone
Samsung confirmed the handset is a 3G phone that uses HSDPA technology to deliver download speeds of up to 3.6Mbps - less than the 7.2Mbps Samsung originally promised, but that may be the nature of the network the phone's going to be connected to.
Samsung said ther F700 will go on sale initially in the UK, France and Germany, with the other European countries getting the handset in due course. In addition to the black version shown in Samsung's product photography, the South Korean giant said it would also offer white and - bizarrely - brown versions.
Is it worried about the much rumoured Zune phone, we wonder?
Check out our Samsung F700 gallery on the next page
Next page: Samsung Ultra Smart SGH-F700 Gallery
COMMENTS
Re: The kindest comment I could make
You say it isn't cool compared with the ipod phone but the ipod (and related products) haven't been cool for a long time, when nearly everyone has something it quickly loses it's coolness...
Has someone wiped their arse on the screen?
Just what is this obsession with shit brown colour schemes? Are the people promoting this thing with those PR images totally insane?
No wi-fi??!!
Just as I was thinking "ooh, that looks nice and my contract is up for renewal soon", I see it has no wi-fi.
Why? I want wi-fi on a phone!! Not too much to ask, surely?
Danger...
Looks more like a Danger Hiptop than an iPhone. But that wouldn't get iPhone in the headline...
3.6 is the correct number
For the reference - 3.6 is the real performance you get out of HSDPA after correcting for brainwash by whalesong.
While the total bandwidth is 7.2 the bandwidth you can get is a power of 2 fraction of the maximum. If there is at least one voice channel in use on the node-B (or any other node-B which sharing a soft handover with the current one) it will be 3.6. If there is any information transmitted between the mobile and the Node-B it will require a channel for itself and will immediately split the code tree in half. Again - 3.6. If the Node-B needs to tell the mobile to adjust its power - it will once again require a channel and will split the code tree in half. This may happen up to multiple times a second. 3.6 one more time. Paging - down to 3.6 again. And so on.
Nice seeing Samsung finally being honest. Now, it will be interesting to see what does it actually take to make the other usual suspects including the operators to start giving real numbers and not whalesong induced brainwash. This is especially valid for numbers for "multiple mobiles using data on the same Node-B at the same time". These are quite entertaining actually.
