Samsung have been putting out a lot of touch screen phones in the past year and it seems like the company isn't going to slow down any time soon, as Samsung has just announced two new additions to it touch screen phone range, the S5600 and the S5230.

Both handsets are fairly budget orientated compared to past touch screen devices from Samsung, but luckily even budget devices these days are quite feature packed. Both models use Samsung's TouchWiz UI and as such Samsung can keep some of the cost down compared to going with a third party OS.

Starting with the S5600, this is a 3G device with 7.2Mbps HSDPA on the 900 and 2,100MHz bands and it also offers quad band GSM. It has a 2.8-inch QVGA (that's 240x320) display and this is the biggest disappointment with this handset. Other features include a 3 Megapixel camera with smile shot, a front mounted camera for video calls, FM radio with RDS, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, USB 2.0 PC sync, 80MB of user accessible memory and a microSDHC card slot.

The S5230 is a quad band GSM handset, but oddly enough Samsung has granted it a bigger screen at 3-inches which a higher WQVGA (240x400) resolution. Apart from the forward facing camera the feature set is the same as for the S5600, although the S5230 only had 50MB of built in memory.

The S5600 measures 102.8x54.8x12.9mm (HxWxD) and the S5230 measures 104x53x11.9mm (HxWxD), but no weights were supplied by Samsung. Both models have a 1,000mAh battery. Both models also support H.263, H.264 and Mpeg4 video, with the S5600 adding support for WMV video as well.

The S5230 should hit retail in Europe from next month, with the S5600 following in May.

You can find the press release here for more details


The S5600


The S5230