Samsung readies Blackberry rival

Samsung Electronics will begin selling its SGH-i320 Windows Mobile-based smartphone in Europe this month. The phone, which Samsung said signals its drive into the smartphone market, has a landscape format display and QWERTY keyboard.

Those two attributes coupled with its external design have already led some to liken it to the Blackberry e-mail devices that are popular in the U.S. and Europe. Like Blackberry phones, the SGH-i320 supports push e-mail, so new messages come automatically to the handset.

It runs Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone operating system and other features include a 1.3 megapixel camera, video recording in MPEG4/H.263, audio playback for MP3, AAC, AAC+, Windows Media Audio, WAV, and Ogg files, Bluetooth, USB and voice recognition. The screen is a 2.2-inch model with QVGA (320 pixels by 240 pixels) resolution and like many high-end Samsung phones it has a document viewer.

The i320 weighs 95 grams and measures 111 millimeters by 59 mm by 11.5 mm deep. It has 120M bytes of internal memory and a microSD card slot for external memory.

It will go on sale in Europe this month and in Southeast Asia "shortly," said Samsung. No other launch details were announced and the company did not disclose pricing.