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Samsung's UpStage Looks To Trump iPhone

bj sends word of Samsung's recently unveiled cell phone, called UpStage. It will ship April 1 (no fooling) for $300, or $150 with a 2-year contract from Sprint Nextel. "...the UpStage is a candy-bar style handset that's less than half an inch thick and not much taller or wider than an iPod Nano. Other multimedia-friendly cell phones struggle to balance the sometimes-conflicting requirements of a conventional handset and a music or video player; the UpStage solves this quandary by simply putting phone functions on one side of the device and the multimedia functions on the other side."

5 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. WhaHuh? by Telvin_3d · · Score: 5, Informative

    Um, how does this have anything to do with the iPhone? What is the point in comparing the two devices? For all I know this phone will turn out to be successful, but it is a completely different product.

    iPhone - 4-8 GB of storage
    Upstage - 64 MB (HA! yes Megabyte!)

    iPhone - 3.5 inch screen at 320x480
    Upstage - 2.1 inch screen at 176x220

    iPhone - Ability to upload your own video content
    Upstage - Access to Sprint TV video clips

    Why are these being compared? They are not in the same product class or market.

  2. Re:"Looks To..." by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 4, Informative

    true true.

    here's the phone in action.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-XFK8zOt9E

    This think strikes me as another clunky convergence device with a million buttons..

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
  3. Re:Already Obsolete by Geekner · · Score: 2, Informative

    It is hard to find high capacity SD cards that work in most devices. First, most devices have restrictions like filesystems and older SD specifications for the card reader. Only revised SD specs support 4GB cards. Even worse, there are new SDHC (Secure digital high capacity) cards, special cards that use a completely different filesystem and make it even harder to find the right card for your device. For example, while looking for a card for my palm tx, palm's website stated a max of 2gb for SD cards. It turned out, since the TX has support for fat32, you can use non-SDHC 4gb cards without issues (possibly goes for trio phones too). Some devices don't support fat32 at all, so they must use 2gb cards with fat16. Even worse, older devices use early SD specifications, which do not support 2gb at all. Its quite a mess, but overall I still like SD cards over the other types of memory I have tried. I just wish more MP3 players supported full size SD, the sansa players I have seen only support miniSD.

  4. Supports java too by LarsWestergren · · Score: 2, Informative

    Runs J2ME, so I can use one of the many open SSH implementations, GMaps, lots of great games etc.

    Being more open and home brew friendly makes this much more attractive to me than the iPhone.

    --

    Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die

  5. American Phones Suck by paulkimchee · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm in Korea right now, and the technology that they put into phones is amazing. They've had DMB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Multimedia_Br oadcasting in their phones for about a year now... The cameras in their phones go up to 5 megapixels, broadband internet (WiBro)... they have tons of phones that trump the iPhone... hands down, but not in the US market. When Samsung exports phones to the US, we're getting phones that Korea had 2-3 years ago...

    --
    WOW