mobiles: Samsung SCH-B600

Today Samsung is set to ship the SCH-B600, the world’s first 10MP camera phone.
The camera includes 3x optical zoom and 5x digital zoom. It also has an auto focus and a flash unit that is optimal for 10MP photos. The LED autofocus feature is the first to be found on a camera phone.

The B600 has a lot to offer besides top notch picture taking quality. For instance, it also features mobile TV capability, an “Anycall Band” feature that allows users to play a “specific melody of instruments” that can be arranged to produce a song for downloading, Bluetooth, MP3 player, MMCmicro support, business card reader, and 128 polyphonic sounds.

If you’re hoping that the SCH-B600 will be released in the states, remember that like all really cool gadgets, this phone is only currently available in the East (Korea). Hopefully that will change in the near future.

Like some of the company's previous phones, the SCH-B600 is styled to look like a conventional digital still camera from one side and a bar-type cell phone from the other side, says Martyn Williams, our colleague with the IDG News Service. The high-end camera phone made its debut at the Cebit exhibition in Germany in March.Its other features include a tuner for South Korea's TU Media satellite multimedia service, Bluetooth, MP3 player, business card reader, and TV-output--for a price tag of about $950.The phone is the latest in a line of high megapixel camera phones from Samsung. The company launched a 5-megapixel camera phone in October 2004, a 7-megapixel phone in July 2005 and an 8-megapixel model in November last year.

When people take photos with their cameraphones it is always pretty obvious. The low-quality and often useless photos that result from a cameraphone will hopefully become a thing of the past and maybe even sooner than expected.

Samsung’s SCH-B600 is simply amazing because it integrates a 10MP camera right into the phone. No, this isn’t just the cheesy camera that most cellphones have either. It features a 3x optical zoom that is also complimented with a 5x digital zoom. Surprisingly, it “also has auto focus and a flash unit that performs optimally for 10 megapixel photographs.“

The announcement of this camera came several months ago but this is still astonishing. It won’t make its way over to the United States but I think it is important simply for the proof-of-concept.

What’s one big problem that manufacturer’s are probably trying to tackle with these high-resolution cameraphones? I’m sure there is a huge battery life issue. I never use the cheap camera that is on my cellphone because after a few snapshots my battery is nearly drained. Heck, that’s with a camera that doesn’t have optical zoom s

o the battery life on this Samsung must last for only a few pictures. I wonder how long it will be until a battery will emerge that is truly “long life?”