Smasung have announced a new camera phone that sports a 5 megapixel camera and a 3x optical zoom. Nothing particularly innovative about that, you might think. The forthcoming Sony Ericsson C905 will be an 8 megapixel camera phone and camera phones with 3x optical zooms have been around for a while now.

However, although optical zoom is far better than digital zoom, it doesn't appear on that many phones. The reason (apart from cost) is size - whenever you zoom out, the lens of your camera moves out of the main body of the phone or camera in which it's situated, and all the gubbins required to do this adds significantly to the device's bulk. This is not what mobile phone manufacturers want, particularly when thin is most definitely in with mobile phones these days. Just take a look at one of Samsung's earlier attempts at a high-end camera phone with super-zooming lens. Not exactly what you'd call slim (or subtle, for that matter!)

So Samsung's latst phone, the Samsung W480, features what it calls an 'inner zoom' feature. Rather than the lens of the phone moving outwards, away from the phone's body, the lens actually remains fixed in place, and the zooming happens internally. By magic. I think!

Obviously, this being a Samsung phone, you get all manner of other technological goodies to play with as well. Read on after the jump for more details.

As well as 3x magical optical zoom, the Samsung W480 also comes with a Xenon high-performance digital camera flash, auto-focus, anti-shake correction, face recognition, red-eye reduction, and other advanced camera features, all of which help you take the perfect shot. You can instantly take photos as well, as the rear of the phone is pretty much a digital camera in its own right. Simply slide back the lens cover and you're instantly in camera mode, and can start taking pics straight away.

You also get 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, WCDMA / GSM global roaming, MP3, Bluetooth, and 8GB external memory support, just for good measure. In short, this is one serious camera phone, and although it's not got the megapixellage of Sony Ericsson's C905 8 megapixel behemoth, it should certainly be capable of taking some great pictures. The only downside is that it's destined only for South Korea...natch!

[Source: Aving.net]