14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung recently launched a new clamshell phone in Brazil, the V820L, a handset created to bring mobile TV to South American users. Samsung V820L is a clamshell that comes with a futuristic design and packs a 2.6 inch rotating TFT display with an unusual resolution of 240 x 300 pixels. V820L is the first handset with support for digital TV to be released in Brazil, being able to offer a continuous TV reception of up to 3.5 hours.
Other features of the handset include 3G connectivity for fast data transfer speeds, Music player, a 2.0 Megapixel camera, secondary video-call camera, 25MB of internal memory, microSD card slot, and a battery that should provide a talk-time of up to 5 hours and a stand-by time of up to 250 hours.
Although the V820L appears on Samsung's website, under the name of SGH-V820L, its official pictures are missing (for yet unknown reasons). The phone has a retail price of 1,499 BRL (Brazilian reals), which means almost $900 or 580 Euros - a bit too much if we think that, besides the TV capabilities, it does not offer too many advanced features. Anyway, bought from a mobile operator, together with a contract agreement, the handset will cost less.
Since we're already talking about operators, Vivo, the largest Brazilian mobile carrier, is the first to offer the new Samsung TV phone. Other major operators will have the phone in about a month, which means that subscribers of TIM, Claro and Oi should be able to buy it too.
Digital TV is a new technology for Brazil, as it's currently available only in and around Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte (the first three metropolitan areas of the country). In the near future, operators plan to cover more cities and areas, bringing mobile TV access to more users.
Brazil currently has about 121 million mobile subscribers, hence it's surely an important market for Samsung, which today unveiled impressive results for the first quarter of 2008: 46.3 million handsets shipped worldwide.