14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung announced today the upcoming European release of its latest high-end touchscreen handset, the F480 TouchWiz. The phone will be available starting June, in most European countries, coming with a major advertising campaign.
The F480 was first presented in February, during MWC 2008, together with many other Samsung handsets. At the time, there weren't too many details about the device, but now we have its complete and official list of specifications.
F480's coolest feature seems to be its TouchWiz user interface - an improved and more colored version of the award-winning Croix UI developed by Samsung. The new full-touch interface is easily customizable, featuring "drag and drop", widget support, haptic feedback and on-screen touch-keyboard with T9 predictive input text. The 2.8 inch display with 262K colors and 240 x 320 pixels will surely provide a nice touchscreen experience, although a bigger resolution would have been better.
Besides the touchscreen display and the advanced UI, Samsung F480 offers: tri-band GSM (900 / 1800 / 1900) and HSDPA 2100 connectivity (for data transfer speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps), a 5 Megapixel camera with auto focus, face detection, image stabilizer and video recording, Google Maps, Music and Video players, background playback mode, FM radio, podcasting, music recognition, Bluetooth and USB (both being the 2.0 version), mobile printing, 232MB of internal memory, microSD card support for an extra of up to 8GB and so on - all in a case that measures 98 x 55 x 11.6 millimeters and weighs 100 grams.
In terms of design, the F480 resembles Samsung Armani, the fashionable, expensive and popular handset released by the South Korean company at the end of 2007. Therefore, it has all the chances to be at least as successful as the Armani phone is.
All in all, the F480 TouchWiz is a serious competitor for HTC's Touch Diamond as well as for Apple's 3G iPhone, which should both hit the European market at about the same time (in June). There is no word yet about the price of F480, but we suppose it will be somewhere around 450 - 500 Euros.
Until the new Samsung gets to be released, you can watch a YouTube video demonstration with its TouchWiz interface, posted back in February by PhoneScoop: