Samsung’s SCH-i730 EV-DO/WiFi Phone

Samsung i730Basically what seems to be a Pocket PC with phone features, the Samsung SCH-i730 EV-DO has a Qwerty keyboard and Pocket PC operating system.

The SCH-i730 is a very large device, even for a Pocket PC PDA. At 191g (6.7oz) with the slim 1100mAh battery (add 18g/.6oz for the extended 1700mAh unit), the i730 is almost bulky enough to rip a pocket off your shirt or pants. It is also relatively large in a physical sense, its dimensions are 115mm x 59mm x 25mm (4.5″ x 2.3″ x 1″), not including the stub antenna. You can also attach an extended battery, which increases the i730’s thickness by another 25%. Extending the keyboard increases the length to a whopping 154mm (6.1″).

The top of the phone houses the stub antenna, which has a built-in whip antenna that can be extended for better reception. The QWERTY keyboard, perhaps the most important feature of the phone, slides out from the bottom of the device. The keys themselves are quite narrow as they are on most devices like this, but decently tall that most people should have little trouble hitting them. The blue colored keys can be used as a numeric keypad in the phone application, and act as numbers during regular text input when used with the Fn key.

The device uses a 620Mhz Intel PCA272 processor. The SCH-i730 has about 57MB of available RAM for use with running apps and as storage. In addition to that, there is about 89MB of built-in flash storage available, and a SDIO card slot that can be used to add even more storage.

The phone market seems to be split as their are cell phones with PDA like functions, and PDAs with cell phone like functions. I think the bulkiness of the SCH-i730 diminishes the usefullness of the device, though I do like having a keyboard, which is what most cell phones do not have. I doubt over the coming year there will be many devices released that are not convergent devices.

August 31st, 2005 Posted by David in Samsung at 9:11 am Comment Now! »

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