Samsung's 8 GB Smartphone Gets FCC Approval

[Ed Hardy]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given its approval to the use of the Samsung SGH-i310 in the United States. This should come as good news to those eagerly awaiting this Windows Mobile Smartphone with a built-in 8 GB hard drive.

In some cases, documents filed with the FCC when a company is requesting this government agency's approval provide the first look at upcoming models, but not in this case, as Samsung officially announced the i310 this spring.

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For those keep count, the 8 GB microdrive in this device will give it significantly more storage capacity than  rivals like Nokia's N91 or even Palm's LifeDrive.

This device will include many features to make it a good music player, like support for stereo Bluetooth headphones, dual speakers, and USB 2.0 for quickly moving songs onto the hard drive. It will be able to play audio in a wide variety of formats (MP3, AAC, ACC+, ACC+(e), WMA, WAV, and OGG).

More Than Just Music

In addition to its audio capabilities, this smartphone will have a 2.0 megapixel camera capable of taking both still images and recording MPEG4 video. It will also include a TV-out port .

The i310 will run Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone and will sport a 2-inch, QVGA, non-touchscreen display.

It will be a tri-band GSM / GPRS device with support for EDGE.

Bad news for the United States

Even though this model has FCC approval doesn't mean it will be released in the U.S. So far, Samsung has only said that the  i310 will be introduced in Europe sometime before the end of this year.

Still, there can be little doubt that companies in the gray market who will be offering this smartphone world wide.

More information on the SGH-i310 can be found on Samsung's web site or the FCC's web site.

[Adama D. Brown]

With tri-band GSM, I doubt it's ever coming over here. The only network that would properly support it is T-Mobile, and even they're increasingly reliant on quad-band phones for roaming on 850 MHz coverage.

[Antoine Wright]

Tis a slick phone, but I too don't see it coming over here. There is just too much space for music that Cinguar/TMobile just don't seem to be itching to support with their current music phone/3G models.

That is not to say that Samsung could convince them otherwise, but I think that this filing was Samsungs means to make sure that it could at least be imported here with less of a hassle versus giving it to the carriers for their distribution.