Samsung announce S5600 and S5230 full touch midrange phones

Today Samsung announced two new additions in their full touch lineup - Samsung S5600 and S5230 phones. They are both running on the latest TouchWiz UI and have large touch screen displays but only midrange feature sets.

Samsung S5600 has already leaked some fifteen days ago with several photos and basic information. It is aimed at the style but budget conscious users with its relatively slim and compact design.

S5600 boasts a 2.8" 16M TFT display with 240 x 320 pixels resolution, which takes advantage of the built-in accelerometer sensor. On its back it features 3.2 MP camera with LED flash that comes with smile detection.

Samsung S5600

The midrange S5600 is quad-band GSM/EDGE that also offers fast data transfers via dual-band HSDPA 7.2 Mbps. Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and USB v2.0 are on board; sadly there is no Wi-Fi here. Samsung S5600 has only 80MB of built-in memory, but it's expandable via microSD card slot.

Samsung S5600 is expected to hit the European market in May 2009, but there is no word on its price.

Samsung are pioneering the Gesture Lock feature on both the S5600 and S5230. It enables users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item just by drawing an alphabet letter on the unlock screen. Users can assign various actions to any of the alphabet letters from A to Z.

Samsung S5230 is even more impressive from the S5600, because it is only 11.9mm thin but sports a larger 3" 256K TFT display with WQVGA (240 x 400 pixels) resolution.

Samsung S5230

Unfortunately, the added features come at the expense of 3G networking. The Samsung S5230 is GPRS/EDGE-only. That makes it a direct competitor to the popular LG Cookie.

Samsung S5320 is expected to hit the shelves in Europe in April, 2009. Its price is still unknown.