Samsung announced, just a few hours ago, the release of Samsung Soulb, the third mobile phone from the South Korean manufacturer's Soul family. Samsung obviously chose to name the new handset Soulb due to its bar-type form factor (or candybar, as it's popularly known).

Staying true to the "Soul spirit", the new Soulb comes in an elegant metallic case and it's the slimmest Soul phone up to now, measuring 111 x 46 x 9.9 millimeters. In this thin body, Samsung packed some pretty nice features, including: a 2 inch TFT display with 16 million colors and 240 x 320 pixels, a 3 Megapixel camera with flash and video, tri-band GSM connectivity (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) plus HSDPA 2100 connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, Music player with most of the popular formats supported, a 3.5mm audio jack, FM radio with RDS, Video editor, HTML browser, Office document viewer & editor, USB 2.0, 1GB of built-in memory and mircoSD card support.

"Soulb is an important stepping stone for Samsung. Soulb proves the world that Samsung is not only a predominant leader in selective form factors, but that it continuously seeks after becoming the leader in all variety of form factors, including slider, clamshell and bar", declared Geesung Choi, President of Samsung's Telecom Business, in a press release issued today.

Is it just me, or is the "leader" reference clearly aimed at Nokia and its current position as the world's first handset manufacturer? It's known that Samsung already has several nice smartphones that run on Symbian S60 platform and it seems the company already thinks about dethroning the Nokia giant. Well, that would not be easy at all.

Anyway, together with the U900 Soul slider and the G400 Soul clamshell, the new Soulb represents a really nice mini-family of phones that have both style and advanced features and can attract lots of users from around the world.

Samsung Soulb will be available in no less than 5 color versions: Platinum Silver, Soul Grey, Amethyst Violet, Soul Pink and Metallic Black. The retail price of the phone was not announced, but we know that the first market where users will be able to buy it from, starting June, is Germany. Shortly after, Samsung will release the phone in many other countries across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. As you can see, North America is, again, left out.