April 27th, 2009
Samsung asks if i7500 is the Android you have been looking for
Samsung is releasing its first phone using Google’s Android software, the i7500 (right, from our Crave blog).
Is this the Android you have been looking for?
Andrew Nusca at the Toybox notes that it has a real touch screen, built-in GPS, WiFi support, a 5 GByte Megapixel camera and up to 40 Gbyte of memory when you add a MicroSD card.
Our British unit notes the phone will be released in Germany through O2. No pricing has been announced.
Personally I would love one of these babies for my trip to CompuTex, especially since the camera is said to be self-focusing.
Pictures would be easy to transfer to the blog since I already have the GIMP ediing software loaded and could move the photos directly to my new Netbook on the SD card.
Of course, I can do that already with my present camera set-up, which is about a year old. But the GPS would be cool if I got lost somewhere in Asia.
The big news is that even if this is not the Android you are looking for another will be along presently. Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Acer have all said they are working on Android kit. Samsung is just the second manufacturer with product, following HTC of Taiwan.
This is supposed to mean very active competition but also a single cooperative community of users. It’s the construction of the community, not the App store, that gives Android its potential punch.
And then when you consider that Netbooks running Android could be announced as early as CompuTex in June, and delivered to U.S. buyers in time for Christmas, that could really be starting something.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/27/09
