The Samsung i550 Specifications

Samsung i550 General Specifications

Communications: GSM 900/1800/1900, WCDMA 2100, EDGE class 10, HSDPA 3,6 mbps

Storage: 150 Mb of user memory, microSD expansion slot

Communications: USB2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (A2DP supported)

Camera: 3,2 Mpix (up to 2048 x 1536), AF

Screen: 2.6”, 240х320, 262000 Colors

Battery: 1200 mAh capacity up to 6 hours up to 260 hours of standby

Dimensions and Weight: 115x53x13,8 mm, 110 g

Estimated price: 400 euro

The Samsung i550 is the first GPS-enabled device from the Korean giant and it’s a great start. The quad band HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE S60 device features a 3.2-megapixel camera (AF w/ image & video editor), 150MB of internal memory, charging via microUSB, 2.6-inch screen, 128MB of RAM, dedicated hot keys, and a trackball ala Sidekick/BlackBerry. Something is going on with Google on this one, but everyone at Samsung is tight-lipped.

The smartphone market, as the most dynamic and rapidly expanding one, poses a great deal of interest to all of the manufacturer companies, and Samsung’s activities in this sphere have been on a peak during the recent months. As it was already mentioned, the critical factor crippling Samsung’s smartphone strategy is the delay in development ending up with new models having morally aged prior to their release dates. Even nowadays this process can be observed in a number of occasions. The i520 model announced at the last year’s decline looked like a real winner and had no direct rivals by that time, as you might probably remember it was a stylish slider sporting a touch keyboard based off the latest platform build (S60 3.1), but it hasn’t been until September 2007 that it entered the market as a publicly available product. Its marketing perspectives now doesn’t look that bright, it’s sure to be phased out and replaced with more forward-looking products over a short period of time due to the estimated low demand. A simplified version, teh i400, was announced at the S60 summit in Madrid, the planned market entry in June failed - the sad dilemma that the product is facing now is either being sold an insufficiently low price resulting in low revenues or suffering from a severe lack of customer demand. That’s clearly understood by the manufacturer - that’s exactly why a large number of new Samsung devices are planned to be introduced to the market in the nearest future during Q4. Even the slightest mistake in advertising, positioning or marketing may lead to an even bigger between Samsung and Nokia on the smartphone market, and filling this gap would become a task next to impossible. A few new smart handsets aimed at winning Samsung new market positions were announced, comprising i450, i550, i560 and i570, each of them having exclusive features unique solely to that particular model.

The first a music-oriented double slider with large stereo speakers providing for an unmatched sound quality and volume, the last one is a slider featuring a QWERTY keyboard, and the two remaining models i550 and i560 are basically the same device (in terms of functionality) but utilizing different form factors - a candy bar and a slider correspondingly. The i560 model hasn’t been officially announced yet but its announce is expected in the nearest future; the solution offers a wide range of features brought together inside a compact body offered at a reasonable price, thus making a product without any direct competition (save for one peculiar device we’ll dwell upon later). As a specimen of the new generation of Samsung smartphones, the i550 deserves a much closer look to let you get acquainted with all of its merits and advantages.