Samsung launches feature-packed phone-PDA

Samsung Electronics launched a wireless handheld device in South Korea Monday that combines a phone, a TV, a camera, and a camcorder in what is the beginning of a line of feature-packed gadgets that the company plans to roll out this year.

The MITs M400 is powered by Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition software and its multiple-functionality represents the company's latest charge toward what it sees as a booming market for converged devices.

In fact, Samsung said Monday that it plans to unveil six or seven new multifaceted products, which it calls mobile terminals, in the U.S. and Europe later this year. They will support operating systems from Microsoft, PalmSource, and Symbian, as well as Linux, the company said.

The MITs M400 is geared toward the Korean market, with a Hangul, or Korean script, version of the Pocket PC software, co-developed by Samsung and Microsoft.

The company showed a prototype of the device at the Telecom Asia show late last year.

Besides phone, camera, TV, and camcorder capabilities, it also has an MP3 player, and serves as a two-way radio and has wireless infrared links for exchanging data with other devices. The MITs M400 will sell for one million won, or approximately US$800, a spokesman for the company said.

The handset has a 3.5 inch TFT-LCD that can be adjusted for portrait or landscape viewing. The 300,000-pixel camera and camcorder can also be swivelled 270 degrees for taking still shots or clips.

The device comes with 128MB of memory, expandable to 512MB and is based around Intel's PXA250 XScale processor running at 300MHz.

Samsung showed off its first MITs in the U.S. in the second half of last year, and rolled out its first device for the Korean market, the MITs M330, in September of last year.

While the MITs M400 is only for the local Korean market, a company spokesman said that Sprint PCS is due to roll out a Samsung multifunction smart phone in the U.S. shortly, and yet another smart phone is due out in Europe by the end of the year.