Samsung's New 'Soul' Slider Marks End of Ultra Series

Samsung Soul

Samsung Soul

Samsung Soul

Today Samsung announced its new flagship product for 2008, the Soul slider. While the announcement comes a few days early, the device will make its first public showing at the 2008 Mobile World Congress, which starts in 3 days time.

The Soul, which derives its name from "Spirit Of ULtra", marks the end of Samsung's successful Ultra series of thin handsets. But unlike prior Ultra handsets, such as the D900 and U600, the Soul makes use of a higher tech navigation control cluster that morphs based on what the user is doing. Looking like a cross between the LG Venus' secondary touchscreen and the Motorola E8's morphing keypad, this new navigation cluster makes controlling the Soul more intuitive. For example, when the Soul is in camera mode, the navigation cluster shows icons for functions like zooming.

Speaking of the camera, it appears to be a fairly impressive 5 megapixel unit with not only auto-focus, but also image stabilization, face detection, QVGA resolution video recording, and what Samsung is calling WDR - "wide dynamic range." The Soul has many other multimedia functions, such as a music player with Bang & Olufsen's ICEpower technology, a built-in FM radio, and the ability for users to create their own themes right on the phone itself. Themes can consist of background images, fonts, and colors selected by the user. The colors chosen by users should come across beautifully thanks to the Soul's 2.2" QVGA display, which is capable of rendering 16 million different color shades.

The metal clad Soul is 12.9mm thick and has tri-band GSM/EDGE (900/1800/1900MHz) support as well as 7.2Mbps HSDPA support on the 2100MHz UMTS band. It measures 106mm x 50mm (4.2" x 1.9") in size, and has an external microSD memory card slot for storage expansion in addition to features like Google mail, an RSS reader, and mobile blogging software.

The Samsung U900 Soul should start appearing on retailers' shelves in April of this year in Europe, though Samsung appears to be planning a global PR campaign for the phone, which suggests that the Soul might make it to other markets, as well.