Samsung AMOLED 12M (SCH-W880)

The Korean market is often a good place to look for upcoming technologies, and the Samsung AMOLED 12M (or the SCH-W880) is a good example of this. It's a 12 megapixel touchscreen device, following on from the likes of the Pixon 12 - but the AMOLED 12M adds some new and interesting features.

The main innovation here is the camera - the 12 megapixel unit has a 3X optical zoom and the camera lens pops out of the back of the AMOLED 12M when in use. Optical zoom is very rare in mobile phones, but it makes a huge difference to the phone's capabilities. Although most phones have digital zoom, this is only really a pixel resize which produces grainy results.

Added to this are a set of dedicated camera controls, again almost the same as you would find on a standalone digital camera. In fact, the AMOLED 12M looks so much like a digital camera that it is hard to recognise it as a phone at all.

In addition, the camera comes with a Xenon and LED flash (why just have the one?), plus the same intelligent autofocus system as the Pixon 12 plus all the usual clever features that Samsung put into their cameraphones. The AMOLED 12M can move from shot to shot in just two seconds, which is a lot faster than most similar handsets.

The video capture looks good too, with a whopping 1280 x 720 pixels at 30 frames per second capture rate. This is equivalent to the display on a 720p HD television set, so it is much better than almost everything else on the market.

The large 3.3" 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen panel uses Samsung's AMOLED technology, which gives a bright and clear display. Samsung are proud of this technology.. proud enough to name this particular phone after it.

There's no mention of GPS on the AMOLED 12M which is odd, but the phone does pack a T-DMB terrestrial digital TV receiver. The AMOLED 12M can also play back a wide variety of multimedia including DivX and XviD movies plus all the usual formats. Internal memory is a massive 4GB, and this can be expanded using microSD cards up to 32GB.

The Samsung AMOLED 12M is a tri-band GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 phone with WCDMA 2100 support. Although this theoretically means that the SCH-W880 will work in Europe, the handset is going to the Korean market only. However, it is likely that we will see this camera unit in other handsets soon.

Samsung say that the AMOLED 12M should be available in Korea from early October.