The handset will have a circle iPod- like keypad with a center menu navigation D-pad.

Oct 13, 2006 10:50 GMT  ·  By

Chinese people have done it again. Besides dazzling all the world with their stupendous martial arts and stuff like that, they are now making handsets that keep worldwide known mobile phone manufacturers with their heads down in shame. Why am I saying this? Because of the Chinese Smart S100.

After the Samsung X828, which is a 6.9 mm thin phone, the S100 7.7 mm thin handset is the next slimmest mobile phone in the world with a candy-bar form-factor.

The phone's design shows a very big iPod influence with the circle keypad design, having a center D-pad for menu navigation. Even if this would make many voices around the world say that this is an iPod rip-off, I think this is going to be a device that will sell in very large numbers mainly because of its iPod-like looks. Who wouldn't like this type of slim and eye-candy design?

The S100 is able to play MP3 and MPEG files, and it offers a very slim 128x160 pixels OLED display, a 2 megapixel camera and a miniUSB port, features that are not very usual for a phone of this size, but I suppose Chinese martial arts helped them cram all of these in such a small package.

The device is working on 900 and 1800 Mhz networks and thus, it won't be available in areas that are using some other type of mobile network.