At the 3GSM fair, Toshiba recently released the G500 smartphone, a device targeting the business area of the mobile market. This handset comes in a slider form-factor and has a design strikingly resembling with Nokia's business class handsets.

The G500 is a tri-band GSM phone working on 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz networks and also featuring UMTS 2100 MHz connectivity.

Being a business cellphone, every customer will automatically want to see its data capabilities and this device will demonstrate it is up to the task showing off its GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g abilities.

It runs a Windows Mobile 5 operating system and the spec sheet mentions a 2 megapixel digital camera with camcorder support, a second VGA camera for video calls, wireless Bluetooth connectivity, 64 MB built-in memory, a music player with support for MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA audio files, a SIP over Wi-Fi feature, a 2.3 inch 65k TFT LCD QVGA color display with a 320 x 240 pixels resolution, a miniSD memory expansion card slot and probably the one feature that will set every businessman's pants on fire, fingerprint authentication.

Forget about stolen confidential data because, now, Toshiba takes care of all that stuff and having such a feature at your disposal, the future sure looks good.

Above all, this phone is a solid device that will come on the market as an alternative to the Nokia cellphones which, until now, had approximately total coverage in the business target area.

A release date or a price for this smartphone haven't yet been announced by Toshiba so check back because if something new about this subject comes to surface, we'll keep you posted.