Samsung wrist watch phone later this year

Once again proving its technical prowess, Samsung will ship the world's first wrist watch style mobile phone, boasting GSM/GPRS, an 8-bit colour display and more in Q4.

Having earned itself a reputation as a mobile phone manufacturer that dares to go new ways, Samsung is once again showing off its technical prowess. Announced at the recent CeBIT fair, Samsung's new wrist watch phone will hit shelves in Europe some time during the fourth quarter this year, boasting advanced connectivity features and a colour display.

Despite being a first-generation watch phone, Samsung's new Dick Tracy-style watch offers a range of advanced features

As cliché as a comparison with famous cartoon character Dick Tracy's wrist watch would be, it still is a just one as Samsung's new wrist watch phone will offers its users two-way communication using the world's most popular cellular standard; GSM. And with an advanced feature set that does in no way stand back to that of the average mobile phone today, the wrist watch phone even trumps Dick Tracy in a few areas.

Dubbed a 'watch phone', the dual-band GSM 900/1800 MHz device will offer one and a half hours of continuous talk time and 80 hours of stand-by time at the flick of a wrist. The handset also supports voice activated dialling and includes a built-in phone book and 40 different polyphonic ring tones, and weighs in at under 80 grams.

Measuring a minute 37.8 x 64 x 17.7 mm, the watch phone also offers support for GPRS Class 10, which should provide users with more than comfortable speed when using its WAP 1.2 browser and e-mail client. In addition, the watch phone also supports SMS and MMS, as well as Bluetooth and speakerphone capabilities. Whether the Bluetooth support also includes a DUN Profile is unknown, but it would be fair to assume that if it did, the watch phone would quickly become a hot item amongst owners of Bluetooth-enabled PDAs seeking GSM/GPRS connectivity.

Users will interface with the watch phone through its 8-bit (256 colours) OLED display, sporting a resolution of 96 x 64 pixels which can be personalized by means of wallpapers. Also, as befits a watch phone, the display shows the time when the user is not engaged in other activities.

Additional hi-res pictures of Samsung's Wrist Watch Phone are available on the following pages.