New Samsung P520 iPhone clone
Samsung are working on the new Samsung P520 touchscreen mobile phone. No prizes for guessing which other phone, er, influenced its design, and of course, it comes with a touschscreen. Being a Samsung, it's also super-slim as well, but despite reports of the P520 being Samsung's iPhone killer, if you looks at its specs, it's actually more of an iPhone clone - and that's not good news...
The Samsung P520's specs include:
- Triband GSM with EDGE
- measures 88x54x8.9 mm
- weighs 102 grams
- QVGA touchscreen, 262k colors
- 3MPx camera with QCIF video recording
- 50MB internal memory
- microSD support
- stereo Bluetooth
- WiFi with UMA
- Document viewer
- 960mAh battery with estimated 220 hours standby and 3 hours talktime
For a Samsung phone, these are nothing less than disappointing. OK so it's got a 3 megapixel camera, but there's no 3G, and only a 262k colour display. In fact, the specs look remarkably similar to the iPhone's, relying solely on WiFi for its high speed data connection rather than 3G.
This is a worrying trend. The iPhone fundamentally shook up the mobile phone market this year, with every mobile phone manufacturer rushing to release a touschscreen to take on Apple's newcomer. But with the iPhone, it's not just the touchscreen that sets it apart - it's the user interface that comes with it.
Tthe iPhone alone isn't 5 years ahead of every mobile phone out there, as Steve Jobs claimed, but its interface certainly is.
If Samsung haven't worked on the interface for their new P520, then what you're left is a phone that mirors the iPhone's features, but that comes without the gloroius user interface that makes the iPhone what it is. In short, you get an iPhone without the one thing that makes the iPhone!
In order to compete with the iPhone, mobile phone manufacturers must either build a phone with better features (e.g. the Nokia N95), or build a mobile phone with the same set of features as the iPhone, but with a similarly glorious user interface.
Unfortunately, some manufacturers seem to have missed this, and instead of innovating in the user interface department, are simply rushing out useless touchscreen phones with relatively poor features. In other words, they've used the iPhone's poor feature set as an excuse to downgrade the features on their own phones, rather than as a reason to innovate their user interfaces.
You can't build an iPhone competitor with the same feature-set and hope it sells - people aren't buying the iPhone because of its features, they're buying it because of its gorgeous interface.
Of course, I could be wrong - we only have the spec at the moment, and no news yet on its interface. But if it's the standard Samsung interface, then then the P520 doesn't stand a chance against the iPhone unless it's deeply discounted. Let's hope the Samsung P520 does come with a brand new killer interface, but I'm not overly optimistic!
[Source: JustAMP]
