Hot Phones and Music Players

A wealth of talented gadgets, including a cell phone with a hard drive and a music player with VoIP.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

Martyn Williams is Tokyo bureau chief for the IDG News Service, a consortium of IDG publications.

It's getting more and more difficult to avoid writing only about cell phones and digital music players in a monthly gadget column--there are just so many interesting products around. This month I'd like to tell you about some new high-end handsets and a few neat new music players. But don't worry, I've thrown in a cool new memory card reader and a cutting-edge notebook prototype for variety.

Samsung SGH-I300 Hard-Drive Handset

Samsung Electronics has come up with a few interesting mobile phones in the past few weeks, but possibly the coolest is the SGH-I300. Samsung's upcoming handset packs a 3GB hard drive and offers more storage space than any phone currently on the market. Samsung's earlier SPH-V5400 has a 1.5GB hard drive.

Matching the SGH-I300's capacious drive is support for a host of audio and video standards that make the handset into a mean little multimedia machine. Video support includes the MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, and Windows Media Video standards; audio support includes the MP3, Windows Media Audio, AAC, AACplus, and Ogg Vorbis formats.

The new phone runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. It's the second handset from Samsung to include a hard drive, but there's a big difference between this and the previous model: the new phone is based on GSM, the dominant cellular standard in use worldwide, and so has been designed with the overseas market in mind. Last year's SPH-5400 is available in South Korea only.

The SGH-I300's wider compatibility should come as welcome news for gadget-hungry buyers who are usually stuck reading about advanced phones that are available only in Samsung's home market. The bad news is that no launch date or price for the handset has been decided.

Sony Network Walkman NW-HD5 Music Player

It's been about six months since Sony first announced its Network Walkman line of hard-disk-based digital music players.

The latest model, the NW-HD5, is the first to depart from the common design shared by its predecessors. The NW-HD5 has a portrait design in which the display sits above the controls. You can use it in landscape mode too, thanks to the ability to rotate the image on the display by a quarter of a turn.

The Network Walkman NW-HD5 has several features that set it apart from Apple's IPod, undoubtedly its biggest competitor. For example, the NW-HD5 runs on a removable and rechargeable battery that supports up to 40 hours of playback. Also, the player has a built-in USB connector and power jack, so no dock or adapter is required.

The NW-HD5 is smaller than earlier models, at 2.4 by 3.5 by 0.6 inches. It weighs 4.8 ounces. Look for it worldwide starting later this month. It will cost around $327 in Japan.

Pantech&Curitel PH-L4000V Camcorder Cell Phone

Following on from the handful of cell phones that look like digital cameras, South Korea's Pantech&Curitel has developed a cell phone that looks like a camcorder.

You hold the PH-L4000V the same way as you would a camcorder; a 2-inch fold-out display, with a 320-by-240 resolution, helps complete the illusion. The phone has a 2X optical zoom lens and can record video in MPEG-4 at 640 by 480 pixels, which is about equivalent to that of a conventional camcorder. The PH-L4000V fails in one respect: The video is recorded at only 15 frames per second, which is about half the rate used by many camcorders and by broadcast television. The smaller number of frames per second could mean a slightly jerky picture. The handset also includes a FM radio tuner.

The PH-L4000V is already on sale in South Korea and costs about $600. There are no plans to sell it overseas.

Pretech Digi Photo Multipurpose Card Reader

At first glance Pretech Electronics' Digi Photo looks like one of those ever-so-handy all-in-one memory card readers, with slots for CompactFlash, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, and Smart Media cards. However, the Digi Photo hooks up to a television or digital projector to let you display images stored on memory cards without needing a computer.

The Digi Photo supports images of up to 16,384 by 16,384 pixels in size, which lets you zoom in several times on large images and still keep the same on-screen resolution. Among other capabilities, it has a slide-show mode, offers standard or wide-screen display, can display several pictures at once in a grid, and supports both the PAL and NTSC video formats. It's available now from Pretech for $48 or through regional distributors.

Panasonic D-snap SV-SD100V Music Player

The latest music player from Matsushita Electric, better known as Panasonic, is a nice little number. The SV-SD100V is a small square-shaped device that features a bright Organic Light Emitting Diode display; support for MP3, AAC, and WMA formats; an FM tuner; a voice recorder; and compatibility with SD Cards. The company says the battery lasts more than 14 hours when playing audio and more than 7 hours when using the FM receiver. It will be on sale worldwide in May and will cost about $172 in Japan; pricing for other markets has not yet been determined.

Samsung SCH-B200 Entertainment Phone

The latest version of Samsung Electronics' entertainment phone should be on sale soon. The handset can receive Digital Multimedia Broadcast signals direct from a satellite or, when inside buildings, from a network of terrestrial transmitters. A subscription service from TU Media offers a range of local radio and TV broadcasts, and the phone makes it possible to tune in to these while on the move.

The phone is a "slide-and-rotate" model with a 2.2-inch thin film transistor LCD screen that has a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. The display is slid upwards to reveal the key pad, then may be swiveled into a horizontal position for TV viewing. Samsung estimates the battery life to be 3 hours. It will be available in South Korea starting in June. Pricing is not yet decided, and there aren't any plans for overseas sales. That hardly matters, though, because the DMB satellite service is limited to South Korea and Japan.

Ezmax EZMP4200P Music Player With VoIP

It seems that every month we hear about a couple of devices being combined together into a new miracle of miniaturization. One of the latest hybrid gadgets is an MP3 player from South Korea's Ezmax that doubles as a Voice over Internet Protocol telephone. The MP3 side of the device is quite standard, but the VoIP functionality is more interesting.

The EZMP4200P contains a VoIP function that can be accessed when the player is connected to a PC via its USB connection. The software runs on the player and uses the PC's Internet connection to place a VoIP call; it is presently compatible with Microsoft's Windows 2000 and later editions. Ezmax is considering making the software compatible with Apple's Mac OS X. It's really quite a cool idea.

Ezmax hopes to put the EZMP4200P on sale in Europe in May; it will cost about $220 for a 1GB model.

Samsung SPH-M4300 Smart Phone

The final new handset this month from Samsung Electronics looks a lot like a PDA. The SPH-M4300's front panel is dominated by a 2.8-inch TFT display 320-by-240-pixel display; a directional keypad and function buttons are located underneath the screen. The number keypad is revealed by sliding the top half of the phone body upwards.

In addition to supporting the CDMA cellular standard, the device packs a 802.11b wireless LAN adapter. This allows its network multimedia features to be used when the user is near a hotspot. The SPH-M4300 also has built-in support for KT's NESpot service, which offers content that includes programs from major South Korean TV networks. However, because this phone is based on Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition, it can also run other applications.

Samsung's SPH-M4300 is available now in South Korea and costs around $700. There are no plans to sell it overseas.

R&D Corner: Toshiba Detachable Display

One of the latest prototypes from Toshiba's lab is a notebook computer with a detachable display. The company says the device will combine the convenience of a Tablet PC with the computing power of a conventional notebook. Communication between the screen and the rest of the PC usually flows along a ribbon cable; in the concept model the cable has been replaced with a wireless connection. The idea is similar to Microsoft's Smart Display, which used a wireless link to connect a small portable display to a more powerful base computer. Microsoft's device failed in the marketplace.

Toshiba's detachable-display notebook could be available as soon as three years from now, but Toshiba still has some work to do on the project. For starters, there's the battery life: Away from its notebook base, the display operates for only an hour.