14 DAY TRIAL // SPH-A523 is the latest Samsung mobile phone to be released in Canada, via Telus, the third largest operator in the country. The handset is already available in the US, as it was released back in January by Helio, the MVNO that uses Sprint's network.
While the US got the Samsung phone under the name of Helio Mysto, Telus will probably offer it to its customers simply as Samsung A523. Currently, the Canadian operator offers no less than 6 handsets manufactured by Samsung: M210, M620 Music Edition, R500, U410, U510 and U540.
The new Samsung A523 has a nice slider form factor and, when opened, it unveils a cool and flat alphanumeric keypad. Aside from this, the phone bring a set of features that position it into the mid-end category: dual-band CDMA EV-DO connectivity, a 2.2 inch display with a QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels) and 262K colors, GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, full HTML browser, email, Music player with support for MP3 and WAV, Video player, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, USB, speakerphone, 100MB of internal memory, microSD card support (up to 4GB), organizer, To Do list, calendar and other basic features.
Samsung A523 weighs 95 grams (3.35 ounces) and, when not slid, it measures 105 x 49 x 12.7 millimeters (4.1 x 1.9 x 0.5 inches). Its battery is an 880 mAh one and it should be able to provide a talk-time of up to 3.5 hours and a stand-by time of up to 200 hours.
Telus has not announced when the A523 would become available, but this should happen pretty soon. The price of the slider will vary, depending on the data plan and contract users choose. In the US, Helio offers the phone for $119 with a contract agreement, so Canadian customers will probably have to get it for about the same amount of money.