14 DAY TRIAL // SK Telecom, the largest mobile operator from South Korea, will soon release the Samsung SCH-M480 smartphone. The handset will be available in the second half of July, for a retail price of 600,000 KRW ($600 or 384 Euros).
The SCH-M480 is, most probably, the CDMA version of Samsung i780, already available in Europe. I'm saying this because, except for some minor differences in the keyboard aspect, the South Korean device looks just like the European one.
Samsung SCH-M480 resembles i780 when it comes to features too. Unlike the i780, though, which runs on Windows Mobile 6.0, the South Korean smartphone comes with the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 OS. But besides the newer Operating System, SCH-M480 packs the same features as the i780: a square 2.55 inch TFT touchscreen display with 320 x 320 pixels and 65K colors, a full QWERTY keyboard, 3G connectivity, internal GPS, A-GPS, Wi-Fi, Video and Music players, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, Pocket Office, email, Web browser (Opera Mobile), Instant Messaging, voice memo, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, front-facing camera for video calls, 80MB of expandable memory, USB 2.0 and so on.
Samsung SCH-M480 weighs 120 grams and measures 115.9 x 61.3 x 12.9 millimeters. The battery included in the smartphone is a 1480 mAh one that should last up to 7 hours in talk-time mode and up to around 400 hours in stand-by mode.
The SCH-M480 / i780 is said to be the next Samsung BlackJack that AT&T will release soon in the US (under the name of BlackJack III), but this is, for the moment, an unconfirmed piece of info. Still, if the above-presented smartphone is indeed the BlackJack III, it will surely be a worthy successor of the previous two BlackJack models.