Samsung have officially announced the Samsung Ultra Touch S8300 mobile phone just in time for the MWC 2009 event next week. The Ultra Touch was leaked a few weeks ago, but the company has now officially released the full details of this new top-end phone. Like LG, Samsung are making a big deal of the Ultra Touch’s user interface. Despite being completely touch based, we won’t know whether it’s good enough to take on the iPhone until they show it off for the first time at MWC 2009 next week.

Even if the user interface isn’t all that great, though, the specs alone make the Ultra Touch a phone to look forward to.

More details after the jump.

Samsung Ultra Touch overview

The first thing you notice about the Ultra Touch is that it’s thin – just 12.7mm. It’s a completely touchscreen phone, but it’s also got a small slide-out numeric keypad, in case you need direct access to numbers.

The screen itself is only 2.8″, which is OK, but considerably smaller than iPhone or Android phones. It does use AMOLED technology, though, so should be crystal clear. It’s scratchproof as well, allegedly, although we’ll soon hear how true this is once people start using it in earnest.

In addition to the touchscreen, the Samsung Ultra Touch really comes into its own when you look at the rest of its spec. With a huge 8 megapixel, dual power LED flash that’s nearly as good as a Xenon flash but uses less power, 30fps video recording, DivX playback, GPS – the list just goes on and on.

In many ways, the S8300 is a cross between the Nokia N95 and the iPhone – big on features and big on user interface, too. It can certainly hold its own against any of the other top-end mobile phones that will be released this year; whether it’s got the user interface to take on the iPhone, though, is a different matter.

Samsung Ultra Touch specification

The complete Samsung Ultra Touch Specification is as follows:

Network

• HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
• EDGE/GPRS Quad Band (850/900/1800/1900MHz)
• UMTS Dual Band (900/2100MHz)
• Display
• 2.8” 16M Full Touch WQVGA AMOLED with Anti Reflection (240 x 400)

Camera

• 8 Megapixel CMOS with Dual Power LED
• Auto-Focus, Face Detection, Smile Recognition, Geo-tagging
• Wide Dynamic Range (WDR)

Video

• DivX / XviD / H.263 / H.264 / WMV9 / MPEG4
• 30fps@VGA Video Recording
• Video Editing: Trim video, Audio dubbing, Live dubbing, Add subtitle, Image capture

Audio

• FM Radio with RDS
• MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA
• Bluetooth Stereo Headset (A2DP)

Value-added Features

• A-GPS with Navigation
• TouchWiz UI with Mobile Widget
• Photo Blogging, Find Music, Auto Rotation, 3×4 Keypad, Ant-scratch

Connectivity

• Bluetooth v2.1 / USB 2.0

Memory

• Internal Memory 80 MB + External Memory slot : microSDHC™ (up to 16GB)

Size

• 110 x 51.5 x 12.7 mm

• Battery

• 880 mAh

This was a guest post by Warren who usually blogs about mobile phone deals at DAP. Grab the RSS feed for his daily updates.