Gearfuse

Normally, we don’t like to post about every new cellphone in the world. There’s simply too many to count and besides, that leaves us with room to post the really cool ones. This time around, Samsung has finally announced the long-awaited Jet. Photos of this phone have been floating around for over a year if I recall, so it’s nice to see it out in the open.

So on to the details: This fucker packs a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen, a crazy 3-D interface that is controlled via that wacky cube at the bottom of the phone, a 5-megapixel digicam with flash and autofocus, 2GB of built-in memory, audio jack, WiFi, DivX and Xvid codecs and to top it off, an 800 MHz processor. Can you believe these specs? Talk about a serious contender to the iPhone, especially with Xvid playback and a processor that’s faster than the desktop I owned several years ago.

No word on a release date or who’s going to carry it.

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Rumors of an upcoming Samsung phone running Google’s Android OS were abound throughout the first quarter of this year. Now Samsung has laid those to rest and announced the I7500, an Android-powered phone that will drop in Europe this June and has already landed in Korea. What can it do? Aside from all your basic media playback bullshit (MP3, videos, etc.), it comes with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, GPS, WiFi and 8GB of internal memory. The camera is 5-megapixels, but that doesn’t mean shit unless it has a decent lens and CMOS sensor.

HSDPA-capable and equipped with Bluetooth 2.0, the I7500 is going to be the first Google device that people will actually want. For now, we’ll have to wait around and see if AT&T gets it sometime this year.

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Ah, yes. The Samsung Memoir from T-Mobile. It was to lead the charge of the next-generation of cellphones. After all, it has a touchscreen, 3G speeds, an 8-megapixel camera and a variety of other features built-in so it must be good, right?

Maybe.

The Samsung Memoir, on paper, appears to the hottest phone to hit the market since Apple’s baby boy, the iPhone. Let’s review the features, shall we?
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Cellphones are a great convenience for us, but not so great for Mother Earth. See, cellphones pack lots of toxic, non-biodegradable chemicals and components. That’s why Samsung created Blue Earth, a cellie made from recycled plastic bottles that can be charged via solar panels on the back of the device. It’ll text, it’ll call, it’ll even tell you how many trees you’ve saved in a day; just don’t call it a phone. Wait, what?

The best part? The Blue Earth will actually go into production this year, unlike half the cool phones we hear about on the web. Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it. But make sure you compost the ashes!

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Samsung is updating its portable media player with the successor to the Samsung YP-P2, the Samsung P3. The device will be formerly announced in January, joining the media player race alongside the iPod, Toshiba U103 and the non-existant MySpace PMP.

Subtle changes include its rectangular aluminum body and three inch 480 x 272 touchscreen. You can expect it to have Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, FM and many of the other typical photo, audio and video capabilities found in portable media players. Storage capacity will range from 4GB to 32GB with varying prices which will be announced at a later date. Expect this to hit store shelves in early 2009.

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Everyone likes giveaways, unless of course that giveaway has to be won by submitting a picture of you posing as Alfred E. Neuman. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is announcing the 12 hottest Bluetooth enabled products for the 2008 holiday season by launching a giveaway event on Bluetooth.com. These products were hand selected to highlight fun, gift worthy Bluetooth enabled devices that are available today. Hit the jump for the details and learn how Gearfuse readers can get an extra edge:

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Right now, in a time where the economy is complete shit and corporate raiding is nothing new, Samsung is trying to buy SanDisk, one of the largest manufacturers of flash memory. SanDisk is being resistant, so what’s a troubled company to do? In this case, SanDisk decided to launch SlotMusic, a microSD card equipped with a full album’s worth of songs from a major label recording artist. These “albums” will be available in stores like Best Buy and WalMart, ensuring they’ll collect dust for years to come.

You must remember, dear reader, that no one buys CDs anymore, let alone some fucked up microSD format. Only 29 albums will be launching with SlotMusic, making selection very limited. Om Malik has a hell of a point when he brings up that this is exactly like MiniDisk. Except that was the 1990s and everything was cool in the ’90s.

I love the above image from the SlotMusic website. I had no idea the iPod/Zune had microSD slots! Oh wait…

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Did you get a ticket for talking on your cellphone while driving? Man, that sucks. Well, do something about it, get a headset. Better yet, get a headset to feed your nicotine addiction. Making calls is as easy as shouting into this cigarette box.

It’s designed for Nokia/Samsung/Sony Ericsson cellphones or people trying to get over cancer by reminding themselves that this pack is not smokeable. It’s the headset that doesn’t mind getting coughed all over, after all, it’s used to it. I’m amazed by the fact that this $6.79 headset is not only cheaper than a lot of headsets, but it’s also cheaper than cigarettes. What the fuck?

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Sprint and Samsung today announced that its joint-venture wireless infrastructure, better known as WiMAX, is ready for service. This comes after years of scrutiny against Sprint for basically fucking everything up along the way. Still, mistakes aside, WiMAX looks to bring a new generation of high-bandwidth web surfing to our laptops.

Have you missed out on WiMAX news in the past? Not sure what it is? This little bit from Wikipedia explains it wisely:

WiMAX, the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunications technology aimed at providing wireless data over long distances in a variety of ways, from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access. It is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, which is also called WirelessMAN. The name “WiMAX” was created by the WiMAX Forum, which was formed in June 2001 to promote conformance and interoperability of the standard. The forum describes WiMAX as “a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL” (and also to HSPA).

With speeds up to 70 Mbps and Siemens announcing the SE680 WiMAX Modem, 2008 and 2009 are gearing up to be the year for broadband access across multiple devices. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts sniffing out WiMAX networks and breaking their encryption.

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Samsung has announced plans to release a line of phones through KDDI Japan which will have AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays. This technology has been in the works by various companies, yet this is the first of these phones being mass-produced, going beyond the concept stage.

Japan always gets lucky with this cool new technology, though once a full-scale product is released, you can expect other companies to follow in their footsteps. We’ll most likely see AMOLED phone screens in the U.S. sometime next year I would think. — Andrew Dobrow

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