Samsung to launch its first Symbian phones

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will later this month begin selling its first smart phones based on the Symbian operating system, it said Wednesday.

The South Korean cell-phone maker will put on sale its SGH-D720 and SGH-D730 models in August in Germany and later in France, Italy and Russia, it said in a statement.

The slider-style D720 and clamshell-style D730 have similar technical specifications. Both are tri-band GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) compatible, with a 1.9-inch TFT (thin film transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display) screen with 176 pixel by 208 pixel resolution. They each have a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth and USB and their software includes an MP3 player and a MPEG4/H.263/Real compatible video player. The phones have 18M bytes of internal memory and this can be expanded by up to 512M bytes through a plug-in MMC Micro memory card.

They'll be based on version 7 of the Symbian OS.

The D720 is the larger and heavier of the two models. It measures 99 millimeters by 47 mm by 22.3 mm and weighs 110 grams. The D730 measures 95 mm by 47 mm by 21.5 mm and weighs 97 grams.

Samsung acquired a stake in Symbian in early 2003 and at the time showed a reference design cell phone running the operating system but has not produced any Symbian-based commercial phones until now, said Jung Shin, a spokeswoman for Samsung in Seoul. Samsung has previously developed several smart phones based on software from Microsoft Corp.