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More details of Samsung Electronics' planned mobile telephone based on Microsoft's Windows-Powered Smartphone 2002 platform are out after the telephone received approval from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The version of the SCH-I600 phone with limited personal digital assistant features submitted to the FCC was a clamshell design dual-band Code Division Multiple Access handset.

Features of the model, according to documents submitted by Samsung, include dual liquid crystal display panels, a main one inside the telephone and a smaller panel on the outside that can be used to display information, for example the number of the person calling, while the handset is closed.

It also had an infrared port and a Secure Digital memory card slot which also supports the SD IO standard extension peripherals, such as digital cameras or Bluetooth modules. The handset will support, the documents said, both e-mail and short message service, and users can chose from one of three ways to input text: a numeric mode, the T9 system, or multipress, in which keys are pressed between one and several times to get the desired letter.

Samsung First to Market with Smartphone

Smartphone 2002 is Microsoft's operating system for handsets that are cellular telephones first and PDAs second, and sits alongside its Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition software, which is designed for PDAs that have secondary phone functions. It was previously known under the codename Stinger and offers users access to an inbox, calendar, contacts book, calculator, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Windows Media and Active Sync, an application which allows the handset to be synchronized with a desktop computer in much the same way a PDA.

Microsoft has previously announced Samsung as a Smartphone 2002 partner alongside Taiwan's High Tech Computer and Compal Electronics and the U.K.'s Sendo Holdings PLC.

Among Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 partners, Samsung is notable as the only one with plans to produce handsets based on the operating system and those from rivals Palm and Symbian, the latter being announced earlier this year at the Cebit show in Germany. It has already produced a Palm-based phone and a new model is on the way later this year.

A prototype of the handset now approved by the FCC was also on show at Cebit. At that time, it featured a MultiMediaCard slot and Samsung said the display was a 176-by-220 pixel thin film transistor screen capable of displaying 65,536 colors.

The version submitted to the FCC for testing carried the logo of Verizon Communications

Some features of products submitted for approval by the FCC can be changed by the manufacturer and, although it is rare, sometimes approved products never make it to market.

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