Future Samsung Phone Plans Leaked

djgil writes "Looks like Samsung needs to be more careful what they do with their powerpoints. A number of prototype Samsung phones have appeared online including three that used Windows Mobile. One phone uses a 500Mhz processor and other had a 3Gbyte Hard Drive for music."

Comments

No Surprise, really

[hey]

This is exactly where everyone knows phones are going. Too bad they don't have what I want: seamless connection to WiFi and VoIP, seamless connection landline Wireless base.

Great...

[grahamsz]

What does this do for battery life. I like that my current Samsung phone is small and runs for most of a week without any recharging.

OTOH i have to recharge my ipod every day that i want to use it (although it is a pretty old one).

Do "consumers" really want this kind of convergence? I know i dont.

HDD Music Smartphone

[Brandon One]

The HDD Music Smartphone is by far the most interesting of the three leaked models. Besides it running Windows it looks like a promising little device. Almost seems suited as a competitor to the iPod and iTunes. As seen by the 3GB hard drive, name, and online music service (whatever that means). The hard drive and MPEG-4 compatibility would also enable it to be a handheld video player. Very interesting.

Re:wowser!

[the_mad_poster]

Man, you can find people's entire financial statements on Google if you know what to look for. I once found a company's entire pay-to-train sessions on Google because the idiots had left it in an open directory. We're talking seven or eight classes that cost $400 a head to attend.

This "oopsy" does not surprise me in the least. Spend enough time in the corporate world with typical PHBs, and you will get used to hearing how such-and-such simple and important security task isn't important because "that's never gonna happen", so we shouldn't "waste time on it". This is it what happens when managers run technical systems rather than tech people.

About Time

[halo8]

To all thoes "I just want a phone phone" or thoes "Will i be able to get reception in my apt in metropolitan area #5?" to you i say.. STFU! this phone isnt for you.

i hate taking my mp3 player, cellphone, pda, and ocasionaly camera with me. The first 3 i cant leave the house with. taking public trasport is a hassel every time i enter or leave a subay i have to pay 4 pockets just to make sure i didnt forget anything. its a hassel.

i for one welcome our combo-cellphone-do-everything overlords

Re:Missing Old Cell Phones/Plans

[tomstdenis]

except prepaid minutes expire.

So yeah, you could shell out 120$ to get a "years worth" [going by the OP] of service but the time expires often in under three months.

Cell phones are largely just a huge scam. Rogers [in ontario they're a big comms provider] reported around 700 million dollars in PROFIT linky linky.

That's because they rip you off seven ways from sunday.

You have the

- service plan
- service fee
- license fee
- 911 access fee
- roaming fee
- text msg roaming fee
- long distance call fee [isn't that roaming?]
- data rate fee [of 0.15$ per KB...]
- ...

And they invent charges too. My replacement phone was file as a "technology upgrade" and they charged me 35$ for "activation" even though I already had an account with them.

The problem is like all other businesses they assume they should keep making profits even if they don't give the customer what they actually want [a simple phone service without frills].

I ranted about this before. Like the scam on quadband phones. The only quadband GSM my provider offers comes crammed with useless crap like java, cameras, mp3 playback, etc... So they get away with charging an arm and leg for it [though I'm sure motorola had a hand in limiting the selection].

Tom

Re:Missing Old Cell Phones/Plans

[Bertie]

Seems like mobile phones are about the only example of a market where Americans get a far worse deal than everybody else in the world. Here in the UK you can currently get a very good UMTS phone which does video calling and the lot for free, on a contract which gives you 500 minutes of calls to any network at any time of day, 20 minutes of video calls, 100 SMS messages, 20 MMS messages, and who knows what else, for FIVE POUNDS A MONTH. When it's that cheap, why wouldn't you want all the bells and whistles?

Leaked?

[Lord Kano]

Gee, I can't think of a better way to create a buzz about a product than someone "stealing" your "confidential" plans about it and then "leaking" them onto the internet.

Bravo Samsung PR. Brilliant strategy!

LK

Re:oh great [redundant post.... redundant comment]

[savagedome]

3GB disk? Too small for most music collections

Remember iPod mini? 4GB is too small for most music collections.

Phone hardware specs

[WebCowboy]

Hmmm 500 MHz processor. Guess that's what ya gotta do if you want to run Windows on your phone. Seems crazy though, given that I've run a database/email/file server that routinely queried 2 million-record database tables, ran dynamic mod-perl web apps and handled gigs of IMAP folders without breaking a sweat, all on a 500 MHz Celeron PC with similar specs as these superphones (except for 20 gigs of drive space).

I'm still trying to wrap my head around WHY. If it breaks or I lose it I have no functionality.

When I'm talking on the phone I cannot look at the screen so it would be a pain in the ass to look up info to relay to the person I'm talking to. Thus, I prefer a separate device, or at the very least a handset and some assurance I won't accidentally hang up on the person while I fiddle with things. PDA phones might be very capable, but if I were a power user I'd prefer a standalone PDA.

I only take pictures when I'm out somewhere interesting (on vacation, etc) so it seems pointless to have one on a phone that I use all the time. There are many places where photographic equipment is banned, and that means I cannot have a camera phone for work (a lot of manufacturing facilities, generating stations, etc do not allow photography equipment inside without signing special agreements). Besides, even the best camera phones take pretty crappy pictures even compared to budget digital cams. Anyone who is even semi-serious about their pics would have a separate camera.

MP3 player? Seems cool, but again a telephone conversation would interfere with operation. Besides, if even an ipod mini is too big for you you can get a basic player that fites nicely on a keychain now.

Video. Puleeeze. I don't care how far technology advances, nothing needs to be watched so bad that I MUST watch it right now---on a 2-inch screen. If these phones had TV-out...well I might look again....maybe...but all we are doing is replacing gadgets with tangled cables anyways.

I hope this superphone fad dies down a bit, and that I won't be forced to deal with unwanted features. I am just fine with a phone that makes phone calls, stores phone numbers and maybe has text messaging so I can receive alerts when I get new email. That is all I do now and nothing I've seen in these phones makes me want to do more. If they want to get me excited about a new phone...how about one with much improved reception , from a phone company that has a billing policy less complicated than spacecraft schematics.

Re:Phone hardware specs

[WebCowboy]

Think about it the other way though, if you trip and fall and smash stuff in your jacket or on your belt, then you only have to replace one thing instead of 4 that might break all at the same time. Also, there's insurance on cell phones, none on the others.

1. I don't carry all four with me at all times. I generally have no need for more than two of those at once

2. You can get insurance on anything you want. My insurance covers cell phones, laptops, PDAs and digital cameras. If I had an iPod that I really valued it could cover that too I suppose.

As for interrupting your calls, most of these phones have speakerphones and "driving modes". They also have headsets that can be used while using the phone for other things.

1. Speakerphones do not allow for privacy.

2. Sometimes you don't want to cover your ears with a headset. Wires are a nusiance. Wireless bluetooth ones require separate battery/charger and bluetooth has some security concerns if not set up right.

Great, a convergence unit is not for you. That doesn't mean they're not for me, and more like it doesn't mean all phones will be convergence phones.

1. Not only is it not for me, in some things it isn't for most people and is a niche market. If it were really appealing then set-top convergence boxes would be much more commonplace today.

2. I HOPE it means all phones will not be "convergence phones", but it could happen, given the kind of industry we are talking about. People buy these phones through cellular providers. Have you tried to get ANYTHING "basic" from a cell-co? Root canals are more pleasant! NO I don't want the colour phone with the camera, thanks. NO I don't want the 400 anytime minutes leasure plan fro only $49.95 (*plus access fee..blah blah fine print). They ALWAYS try the upsell, and while they are not too pushy there, if you try to go LOWER than their widely advertised "basic" plan it becomes a serious battle.

I can just imagine: colour cellphones with cameras and games and crappy reception are cool gimicky things popular with teenage girls and make the cell-co boatloads of money. Marketing PHB sees the $ numbers regardless of the demographic and soon the "base plan" offers the colour, game-filled cam-phone, and if you want something basic then you are pulling teeth even more to get it. If you don't get a discount for getting a plainer phone at that point so help me....

Re:oh great [redundant post.... redundant comment]

[Bertie]

It's like those old Vidal Sassoon adverts. "Take two bottles into the shower? Not me. Now I have a crappy shampoo and a crappy conditioner in one! Just watch me flick my shiny hair from side to side, and imagine I haven't spent the last two hours in a stylist's chair!"

If you really want to cart around a phone, an MP3 player and a camera at all times, go ahead. Right now your phone might not be able to do a job as good as all three, but it's good enough for some, and by the looks of what Samsung are up to, it won't be long before they're good enough for a lot of people. I mean, Casio have a phone out in Japan with autofocus.

It wasn't so long ago that you'd have needed a room full of all sorts of equipment to play music, watch videos, play games, etc. Now all you need is a decent PC. That's progress.

Re:Mobile envy

[therblig]

I'd pay the $1.50 just to have them leave it off. My phone would not be useful to me if I had to leave it at the security desk when I visit customers who ban the phones because they have that lousy camera on them. (I think all our major customers ban them.) Unfortunately, it is getting harder to get phones without the cameras.

I don't have a camera phone, but the one I have looks peculiar enough that at one customer's site, I had to wait while security inspected my phone for a few minutes to make sure no camera was hidden there.

Re:only 15% of customers use most of the features

[shic]

You're absolutely right - we share a common sense of priority - sadly the phone manufacturers do not... I've a good idea why not.

A couple of years ago I splashed out on a Nokia 8310 having spent several years on the familiar treadmill where no phone would physically last a whole year. Flimsy designs left me with broken aerials; cracked screens and batteries which lost contact with the phone if they managed to retain charge for a whole day. In contrast the 8310 has proved a solid performer - it still retains charge for a week (making/receiving very few calls) and save a few minor scratches remains "as new". The phone is conveniently small, lightweight - and has all but one feature I need today. The missing feature: wireless hands-free for my car to allow me to legally make or receive calls when sitting in a queue of traffic... even if I didn't think of the phone before I set off. The only serious contender seems to be the Nokia 6230 - which (as far as I can tell) is both larger and has a shorter battery life.

Bluetooth has been available for years and I assumed 24 months of development would allow me to choose a phone and car kit with ease to replace my 8310... I was amazed. The new ranges have shorter battery lives, are more bulky and only a select few support blue-tooth... progress? I suspect I would find a camera useful on some occasions - and I think the idea of transferring personal documents on an MMC card is neat, but it doesn't justify an increase in size or weight, nor will I accept a decrease in battery life. I am left cold by colour screens and would swap the "GUI" interface for the old-fashioned one I'm familiar with in an instant.

Like yourself, I'd love to integrate my mobile's phonebook with my landline phone, but I suspect this desire isn't shared by the mobile networks, and hence (by way of commercial pressure) not shared by phone manufacturers either. I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses my mobile to make calls when I'm home merely because I can't be bothered to re-enter a phone number... an open interface to the mobile phonebook would likely threaten this revenue.

Windows Mobile 2003

[ProfitElijah]

I got a Windows Mobile phone recently, in the UK it's called the SPV C500, but I think it's unbranded name is HTC Typhoon. it is an absolute dog. Shockingly poor phone. Maybe it's just because I spent a few years in the land of the mobile phone where design is so superior it's not even funny. Leave out that they sent emails not SMS or MMS, even the texting software I used to have, which wasn't predictive, was better than the turd that some developer crouched down and dropped into my phone. Here's why it sucks so hard. You'll see there are some software problems and some industrial design problems. The moral of this rant is that it's all got to be good to be a good phone.

Hard to use joystick

Menus and options are selected and navigated using a flat four-way joystick, with a centre-click for select. Centre-clicking isn't difficult, but when my hands are cold (and it is December, which means cold in London) it's easy to hit slightly in the wrong place and go up before clicking. With a phone as slow as this one, this can be incredibly frustrating. It leads to putting the wrong word in when writing texts, it leads to choosing the wrong program to start, and it leads to a whole world of related pain. Stylus! Please!

Inconsistent UI

The phone has two pointless buttons: Home and Back. They probably thought it was a really good idea to have one click to go home, but it's not. You can press the Back button a few times, or if they had been clever tie it holding down the back button in order to do that. Or at least you could have done that if the UI was consistent. In fact it seems that it's up to the apps what they do with the buttons on the phone. The camera application will only quit if you press the Hangup button! You can't even cancel though the menu!

Slow boot

This is simply wrong: it takes over a minute between me pressing the power button and my phone being usable as a sort of rubbish PDA, and then an arbitrarily long time to recognise the network it's on and be actually ready to use as a phone. A minute never seemed so long before I spent one staring at Windows Mobile.

Crashes

Another one that's simply wrong: it's a phone. It crashes. I'm pretty sure that my parents' phone doesn't crash, possibly because it's made of bakelite and fixed to the wall with rusty iron screws, but the idea is there. Make a phone which doesn't crash. If it crashes, fix it and then sell it. A phone that periodically requires me to take the battery out and wait that painful minute before I can use it again doesn't deserve an owner.

Slow software

Actually, I don't know if this is the software's fault or the phone's, but the experience is slow. My friend has a Palm Treo 600 (he loves it) and his mapping software flies around. He uses his stylus and just drags the map around. I have to click up, down, left or right on the stupid little joystick in order to move around the map. And whereas the mapping software he uses is an image of a streetmap, mine is a bloody vector image, with only the major roads on it, and only some of them labelled with names. It's basically fucking useless. I tried to use it to find somewhere in Soho, in the cold December rain. In less than the time it takes to boot I called my friend with an A-Z and he told me where to go.

Button placement

This is another simple, simple, simple cock-up. There are two buttons for adjusting the earpiece volume. Never mind that they don't work very well and that the earpiece volume goes up in about 4 steps and so could be easily managed with one button, the problem here is that you have to press them hard, which means bracing against the opposite side of the phone, where the camera is. So, while you are in a noisy call, you adjust the earpiece volume and nine times out of ten start the camera. If you recall, you can't stop the camera app in order to check your calendar or contacts without pressing the hangup button, with the predictable effect of hanging up.

Texting s

Re:Windows Mobile 2003

[argent]

Another one that's simply wrong: it's a phone. It crashes. [...] A phone that periodically requires me to take the battery out and wait that painful minute before I can use it again doesn't deserve an owner.

That matches my experience with the T-mobile Pocket PC. I've never before had a cellphone that crashed.

Unfortunately, I've got another once since. Company phone, they changed service, and instead of the bog-simple Nokia "bar" with minimal features and good battery life (just the way I like it... it's a frigging phone, if it can't get that part right I don't care if it has a camera, MP3 player, or 3d porn projector) I have a really clumsy LG forty-something-hundred that periodically wakes me up in the middle of the night with its "welcome" music because it crashed or got updated or something. I've also had it mysteriously eat its battery when I left it in a locker at the hospital for half an hour... I guess it was panicking because it couldn't get a signal and shorted its brains out.

Christ.

Here's what I want: a phone, a big battery, a little black-and-white screen that doesn't use much power, room for a couple hundred numbers, and a place I can plug in a cable from my PDA or notebook to get a TCP connection WHEN I need one. That's it.

No bluetooth, no camera, no ringtones, no games, no wireless web, no "Get It Now" or other overpriced vendor-provided software, no downloads, uploads, wideloads, or overloads. Just a dumb connector to a dumb network I can plug my own, separate, not-tied-to-any-carrier, I-can-install-my-own-software, I-own-thank-you-very-much smart end-point that I control.

Is that too much to ask?

Re:crash

[argent]

Does that mean my cell phone will now crash as often as my PC at work does?

More often. Your PC is running NT, not CE.

I routinely reset my Pocket PC phone edition before placing a call, because otherwise it was likely to crash while trying to complete it.

I don't know why they can't just run NT on these things. We were running NT desktops on P-100s with 16M in the '90s, with 1024x768 screens, and they were FASTER than the Pocket PC (and we used to think those requirements were outrageous). Why they need to run a stripped down pre-NT-Windows-based OS on a machine with less than 1/16th the screen area, four times the RAM, and 4 times the CPU I have no idea...

Re:More features == More things to break

[argent]

I had a Nokia like that, then my company changed carriers and replaced the fat, dumb, happy Nokia with the monochrome screen, no value-added features that I'd have to pay Verizon extra every month to actually use, and good enough battery life that I could forget to charge it for a week and it was still working...

Now I have an LG flip-phone with a color screen, "Get It Now", and all kinds of features that ... "not only don't I want them, but I can't imagine anyone wanting them" (thank you William Gibson), and I still haven't figured out how to completely disable the unusable-and annoying-voice-recognition with the easy one-finger activation that you can turn on if you unhook the phone from the belt clip the wrong way...

And if I go a day without charging it turns itself off... wasting enough power to keep it on standby until I get home by playing a cute little movie and tune to tell me it's out of power.

Christ.

Whoever designed this needs better meds.