Samsung D980 Goes to Russia

In July, Samsung released the first mobile phone that supported two SIM cards simultaneously. The device was first seen with China Mobile's logo on it, which clearly meant it was bound to go to China. Now, as it turns out, the device is now available in Europe as well, the Korean group announcing that the dual SIM will go on sale in Russia.

The official announcement appeared on Samsung's Russian webpage yesterday, so now the only question still unanswered is the one referring to which networks will bring it on the market and what price tag it will put on it. At the moment, the phone is available for prices starting as low as $350, but users can pay up to $750 for the unlocked version. Clearly, this means that the phone won't be on the affordable side, but then again, besides the fact that the device supports two SIMs, it also has a lot of other high-end features.

The Samsung D980 was designed as a high-end phone, thus incorporating a full 2.6-inch, 256K color, 240 x 320 pixel touchscreen, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and video, USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, together with the TouchWiz user interface. The device also comes with multimedia capabilities (music and video player), an FM radio, document reader and a microSD card support of up to 2GB.

The downsides of this device would be the fact that it will only work on 900 / 1800 / 1900 GSM/GPRS/EDGE, as it does not come with 3G connectivity, and that it only supports up to 2GB of expandable memory, while having just 45MB of internal memory. Yet, considering that Dual-SIM allows users to have only one phone instead of two, and that this particular device comes with some high-tech goodies, the so-called downsides can be easily overlooked, especially since it would mean that users won’t have to pay for another device.