Honestly, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What would you say if we told you that the hottest most well-specced S60 handset in the world was made by Samsung as opposed to Nokia? What would you say if we told you that Samsung finally came around and threw a quad-band GSM antenna into it? Right, us too! Now what would you say if we also told you that Samsung opted out of WCDMA 850, leaving North Americans to hunt for WiFi when we need to get our high-speed on? Heart wrenching, we know. The phrase “so close but yet so far” seems apropo. Last night Samsung made a reality out of the rumored 8 megapixel beast of a slider otherwise known as i8510. Its specs are amazing:
- Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz), dual-band WCDMA (900/2100MHz)
- Symbian 9.3 S60 3rd Edition FP2
- 2.8″ 16m color QVGA TFT display
- Built-in GPS receiver and accelerometer
- WiFi
- 8 megapixel autofocus camera with image stabilization and face, smile, and blink detection
- Video recording QVGA @ 120 fps or VGA @ 30fps with full editing suite onboard
- 16GB internal storage, microSD card slot
- Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
- 106.5mm x 53.9mm x 17.2mm (3.9″ x 1.9″ x 0.6″)
- 1200mAh battery
N96? What’s that? An S60 smartphone that will have WCDMA 850, that’s what. If not for the AT&T 3G compatibility issues you can believe that we would be snatching up the Innov8 faster than you can say “Europe’s hottest S60 camera phone”. 2009 should be an interesting year for S60, to say the least.
