Commentary

Samsung Launches A Slew Of iPhone Wannabes

This week saw something ridiculous, like three different touch screen devices from Samsung hit the market or be announced. The Delve, the Behold, and the Eternity bring a mixture of media and smartphone-like features complete with touch screen input.

This week saw something ridiculous, like three different touch screen devices from Samsung hit the market or be announced. The Delve, the Behold, and the Eternity bring a mixture of media and smartphone-like features complete with touch screen input.I can barely keep up with all these new phones from Samsung. The South Korean electronics giant just keeps churning them out one after the other.

The Delve, Behold, and Eternity all have something big in common. That commonality is the TouchWiz user interface. TouchWiz is a second-generation touch UI from Samsung that is meant to (sort of) compete with the iPhone and Android UIs. It offers a touch input with a dock full of applications to one side. You can drag-and-drop applications or shortcuts or whatever you want to the phone top to customize its appearance and usability.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

I've used this interface extensively. While it is no iPhone UI, it is a far cry better than what Samsung offered with its Croix interface, and the interface on the (stillborn) Samsung Instinct. I like how easily it is customized and made to fit the users wants and/or needs.

Now, about the phone's themselves...

The Delve has a three-inch touch display with a software keyboard and haptic feedback. It carries an EVDO radio for 3G data, Bluetooth with A2DP stereo, and GPS. It has a 2-megapixel camera with video capture, 3.5-mm headset jack, supports microSD cards up to 8 GB, and has a full HTML Web browser for surfing the Web. The Delve is being offered by Alltel and U.S. Cellular.

The Behold also has a full-QWERTY on-screen keyboard with haptic feedback similar to the Delve, but it features a 5-megapixel camera with flash that can capture video. The Behold's camera is excellent, and Samsung did a good job of incorporating touch features into the camera software. It has quad-band GSM/EDGE radios as well as 1,700/2,100-MHz 3G radios, which makes the Behold compatible with T-Mobile's 3G network. The Behold also has a full Web browser, stereo Bluetooth, and GPS. The Behold is available only from T-Mobile.

Next up is the Eternity, which was recently announced by AT&T. The Eternity has quad-band GSM/EDGE and dual-band 850/1,900-MHz 3G radios on board for surfing AT&T's 3G network. It also carries GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP stereo, and a 3-megapixel camera with Video Share. Video Share lets you beam a live video feed to one other phone. The Eternity has an on-screen full-touch QWERTY keyboard and an accelerometer. It also is another phone that is compatible with AT&T's Mobile TV service, which uses the MediaFLO network for live broadcast TV.

All three of these devices are capable feature phones, but none of them set the bar too high.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links