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Samsung Electronics has launched a pair of new cellular telephones at this week's Consumer Electronics Show--one based on the Palm operating system and one with a digital still-camera function.

For Palm aficionados, the SPH-I500 handset won't be new. Its existence has been known since August of last year when it was approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, and it has appeared in mock-up or prototype form at several trade shows, although this is the first time a finished version of the phone along with final specifications has been shown.

The phone looks much more like a conventional clamshell-type handset than a PDA. The main display is a 65,000-color, 162-by-176-pixel TFT LCD with a touch panel; the Graffiti input panel, which is usually directly underneath the main display on a PDA, is separated by the clamshell hinge and at the top of the lower half of the phone.

It runs Palm OS version 4.1, has 16MB of RAM, and is based on a Dragonball processor running at 66 MHz. The phone is compatible with CDMA2000 1x networks and it has dimensions of 2.1 by 3.4 by .8 inches and weighs 4.6 ounces.

Multiple Mobiles

The SPH-I500 is the second Palm OS-based telephone launched by Samsung in less than two weeks. The Seoul company put on sale its SPH-I330 PDA phone, an updated version of a previous model, at the end of 2002.

The second new phone from Samsung is the SGH-V205. This GSM handset supports GPRS packet data transmission, MMS, and WAP.

Also a clamshell design, it has a 100,000-pixel image pickup built into the hinge that can be used to take still images. The screen has 65,000 colors, 128-by-160-pixel resolution, a thin film diode LCD panel, and a 40-polyphonic-tone ringer. The telephone measures 3.6 by 1.9 by .9 inches and weighs 3.4 ounces.

The company did not announce pricing or availability details for either handset.

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