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Monday February 11, 2008
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Here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I'm writing about the latest, greatest and hottest cell phones. There's new stuff from Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson - especially the last one. Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1 is a real barn burner. Yet I am writing nothing about the two other top-five mobile phone manufacturers. Why is that?
Samsung and LG released products at this show - just, very conspicuously, nothing that could possibly come to the US market.
For instance, the Samsung Soul, shown at left, is a gorgeous new slider phone with a stainless-steel body, a 5-megapixel camera and a very sexy touch interface with a little touchpad whose buttons change depending on what mode you're in - like the LG Venus, but smoother. The thing is, all of Samsung's and LG's models released at the show were triband 900/1800/1900 Mhz GSM, sometimes with 2100 Mhz UMTS. That's a poison pill, almost in code. No US carrier will pick up a phone without the 850 Mhz band on it, and Samsung and LG don't sell phones here except through carriers.
Don't worry, though. Samsung and LG, the number two and three firms by market share in the US, have plenty of phones coming up in 2008, company reps said. We're just more likely to hear about them at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas in April, which is all about the US market. So stay tuned for Korean phone goodness.
For now, try our friends at Phone Scoop if you want to know more about Samsung and LGs non-US releases. (We have no business relationship with Phone Scoop; we just like them personally.)
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February 12, 2008 5:57 AM
But the Soul is quad-band GSM!
February 12, 2008 2:15 PM
You're right, but I think it's still 2100 UMTS. That's a poison pill considering that Samsung doesn't sell direct here.
Anyway, pretty much all of Samsung's US releases are custom designs for the US carriers, and that's how the US carriers like them.