From Seoul comes Soul, Samsung's new handset

By Tim Conneally | Published February 8, 2008, 12:47 PM

Samsung unveiled its newest flagship handset and member of its "Ultra Edition" family, a line which seeks to provide the slimmest phones in attractive designs: The Soul.

The standout feature of this slider is the "Magical Touch" panel, produced by DaCP. A small panel beneath the 2.2" QVGA screen changes and adapts its functions in response to which application is running. For example, while running the MP3 player, it can act as the media control interface, or while using SMS functions, it can manipulate text.

This 3G device comes with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, image stabilization and face detection, an FM radio, Bluetooth 2.0, a media player, and a Bang and Olufson ICEpower amplifier.

Also especially noteworthy in such a small device is its HSDPA Internet connectivity offering as high as a 7.2 Mbps downlink speed. This speed is complemented by a suite of "2.0" features such as a mobile blogging application, an RSS reader, and GMail optimization. Samsung Soul--2008 Ultra Edition handset Senior designer Minhyouk Lee somewhat cryptically described the Soul's all metal chassis design: "The fundamental direction of the design concept development of Soul was to keep 'the epitome of self-discipline' by minimizing all the factors to a simple yet beautiful device."

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I do not understand why Samsung is not making Windows Mobile phones like Soul? They make nice hardware - but phones need to be functional software wise too...

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Agreed 100%

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I still think the Motorola V60 was one of the best looking phones ever made. It was a nice mix of business and class and style.

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The Motorola V60 and V66 phones were both the worst looking phones ever created. They were just as bad as the peanut shaped Motorola C332 bar phone as far as functionality goes. The color scheme on the Motorola V60 and V66 phones remind me of the Motorola analog brick phone my family used to have.

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It's about time someone improved the camera inside mobile phones. Still no optical zoom but at least it has image stabilization (but probably not the vastly superior optical kind).

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