Almost missed this one! Just before the New Year, leaked pictures emerged of the Samsung S8300, a new camera phone from Samsung that looks set to take over over where the U900 left off. The S8300 comes with an 8 megapixel camera, and includes GPS, FM radio, a gorgeous 2.8″ 16 million colour AMOLED screen and 7.2 Mbps HSDPA.

That’s a great spec, but it could be the start of a new trend in mobile phones throughout 2009…

Samsung said last year that they were no longer going to focus on high end mobile phones. That might be a strange thing to say given the features of the S8300, but the fact is it offers nothing more than other high end phones have done for the past 18 months or so. Indeed, other than an 8 megapixel camera, it’s features aren’t that different from the Nokia N95 that was launched back in 2007.

As such, the S8300 is a powerful mobile phone, but it’s not what you’d expect from high end phones any more.

It seems, therefore, that this is the kind of feature set we can expect from our mid-range phones for 2009, while the high end phones move more towards becoming smartphones. Indeed, with the hige rise in demand for netbooks, I can see a time in the next year or two when smartphones become the new netbooks, while phones with the same kind of features as the S8300 become the norm.

A whole world of cheap mobile phones with GPS, 8 megapixel cameras and broadband data rates – now there’s an exciting prospect!

[Source: DailyMobile.se]