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Samsung shows off its Femtocells
SAMSUNG WAS SHOWING off three interesting things before CES this year, two phones and a phone accessory. The phones were nice, but the accessory is the killer part.
The first one is a European phone, the Samsung F700. As you can see, it is a touch screen that slides out into a full haptic qwerty keyboard.
The OS is a custom job based on Linux, and it doesn't really look like anything we have seen before. Don't take that as good or bad, it is just different. Vodaphone will be selling this model.
The other one is a little lower down on the price scale called the Helio Mysto. It is a tall skinny phone with a decent screen, but it slides out to unveil a keypad. Nothing special, but Samsung is claiming that it is the slimmest slider phone on the market.
Last we come to the potentially killer device, the femtocell. You may have read about these a while ago, promised to be the next big thing in phones, and it just might be. It is a low power cell transmitter that you keep in areas that have little or no coverage, and it acts just like a little cell tower.
The first one you see is a Sprint model, and it is being tested now. Things may change before it goes live, but the plan is that you pay a base monthly fee, and all your calls through the box are not counted against your minutes.
This is a really good idea for both those with low signal strength and for people who talk and talk and talk and talk at home. If this works out, goodbye land lines, they won't be needed any more. ยต
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T-mobile already has this service and it's been rumored that the iphone will use this as well with it's built in WI-FI capability built in. Look for a complete redesign of the landscape in the coming year due to cell phones using WI-fi to transfer calls which cost a fraction of using the cell towers. This is prevelent in Europe as well, with Skype registering to distribute cell phones. To top it all, you now see plans like Helio's unlimited plan with unlimted voice and data for $99. Something we would have never imagined.

Will the low-power femtocell still work if I have a full-power cell tower right outside my apartment?
Remember, the F700 does have a touch-screen ... dunno if it does multi-touch or not. But the keyboard *should* just be a bonus extra if they've designed the interface nicely.
-ihiaviz
Why (oh why) have Samsung - along with many other phone manufacturers - not given the numbers their own line on this phone's keyboard?

With the limited number of keys available, incredibly 'basic' or useful keys then have to double up to have two modes.

On my O2 XDA the:
- confirm key is also speech marks
- the four arrow keys are each a different bit of punctuation
- the space bar doubles up as a shortcut for extra symbols.

On the Samsung pictured, the left arrow doubles as a down, and the right as up - I guarantee this will make navigation a royal PITA.
Does it plug into a landline, or does it amplify the signal strength and rebroadcast the signal to the nearest mobile phone mast?

Or is it option 3?


That femtocell sounds very much like the Wi-Fi adapter that T-mobile has been selling for at least 1 year in the States. It would be a good thing, if you had taken some time to describe how the bloody thing is supposed to work.

I, Franzius
... even more electro-smog. goodbye land-lines, hello cancer ....