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Samsung Electronics is about to launch several new versions of a video cell phone it unveiled last year for use on South Korean third generation cellular networks.

While the phones will not immediately be available outside South Korea, they do provide a glimpse of what can be expected from handset makers during the course of 2003. This year Samsung expects video to start appearing in more and more high-end handsets, just as the still camera function did during 2002: such handsets could account for up to 15 percent of Korean phone sales this year, Samsung said in a statement.

The three new handsets are all updated versions of the SCH-V300 handset that Samsung unveiled in 2002 and that was used by SK Telecom in trials of its CDMA2000 1x EvDO network. That network, which recently entered commercial service, is capable of data transmission at speeds of up to 2.4mbps.

Video Comes Calling

The first handset, the SCH-V310, will go on sale later this month. It can capture still and moving images, and can be used to make a two-way video call.

The image sensor has a resolution of 110,000 pixels, and the device stores video in MPEG-4 format at 11 frames per second, said Helena Lee, a spokesperson for Samsung. That is less than half the frame rate of a standard video camcorder, although not as slow as some of the other early video handsets, which capture images at around 2 frames per second. The handset's built-in memory provides enough room to store up to 20 minutes of video, Lee said.

Other features of the handset include a TFT LCD main display with support for 260,000 colors and an OLED display on the outside of the handset that can show 256 colors, according to the statement. The camera also has a 2X zoom function, Samsung said.

Additional Options

A second handset, the SCH-V330, will follow sometime after February, Lee said. That handset is similar to the V310 model, although its image sensor has 300,000 pixels and so is capable of capturing images at up to VGA quality (640 pixels by 480 pixels).

The last of the three handsets, the SCH-V3000, will be similar to the V310 but designed to work in the 1.8-GHz band rather than the 800-MHz band used by the other phones, Lee said.

Samsung has not decided on a price for the handsets although the V300 currently sells for around $600, said Lee. South Korea is the only country with commercial CDMA2000 1x EvDO networks and Samsung has no plans to sell the phones overseas.

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