14 DAY TRIAL // After the high-end Omnia i900 Pocket PC, unveiled by Samsung less than one month ago, the largest South Korean handset manufacturer has come up with yet another Windows Mobile 6.1 handset, named Samsung i740.
Although it's not presented in an official way, the i740 has made an appearance, today, on the Czech website iDNES. The available images with the new Samsung show it to be far from having the elegance of Omnia, although it's also far from being what you'd call an ugly device. The i740 is, nevertheless, weird for a Samsung handset, as it has a spherical navigation button similar to the trackball used by RIM in its BlackBerry smartphones.
Looks aside, Samsung i740 brings the following features: a 2.8 inch TFT touchscreen display with 240 x 320 pixels, built-in GPS, a 3 Megapixel camera with auto focus, flash and video recording, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, Music and Video players, FM radio, Web browser, mobile email, USB 2.0 and a 624 MHz processor. The new Samsung measures 107 x 59 x 13.8 millimeters and, as I've already said, it runs on Windows Mobile 6.1.
The built-in memory of i740 is not known, but the device supports microSD cards for up to 4GB, which should compensate for the eventual case that the internal memory is insufficient.
What's not too nice about the new Samsung is that it apparently lacks both 3G and Wi-Fi, coming only with quad-band GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz). Knowing this, the handset might have been created by Samsung mainly for the markets where 3G is not yet widely embraced, like China, India or South America.
Samsung i740 should be released by the end of this summer - we'll see then what its target is as well as for what retail price it is being offered.
