Samsung and Infineon create Symbian based superphone

SYMBIAN WILL BE POPPING CHAMPAGNE bottles open all over the place at the latest Samsung and Infineon announcement. The companies have combined their skills to create a new mobile handset that puts just about everything else into the shade. Samsung had only just bought 5% of Symbian too.

The new design will be available to Symbian licensees, in Symbian's words, "this solution will help significantly to reduce time to market and project risk for Symbian licensees, who already account for 80% of the mobile market". Samsung and Infineon will still be making a profit by selling the chips that go into the design.

At the heart of design is Samsung's new System-in-Package (SiP) chip. That's a 203MHz ARM processor with 32MB of NAND Flash and 32MB of SDRAM. To give you a comparison, the much-admired Sony Ericsson P800 has all of 12MB of user memory.

The system includes Infineon modem technology that supports GSM/GPRS. It's also built around a digital camera with MPEG-4 decoder and encoder. To round things off, there's an MP3 player too.

Samsung and Infineon are demonstrating board-level prototypes at the 3GSM conference in Cannes.

The new handsets seem to be everything a smartphone should be. The comparatively huge amount of memory and high processing power should produce a leap forward. We can't wait to see the first devices to hit the market using this design. With the two companies showing off board-level prototypes, we hope the wait won't be too long. µ

See Also
Samsung buys 5% of Symbian
Samsung intros smartphone on a chip

Update
This story originally claimed that the new Samsung chips would have 256MB of both types of memory. This is not correct, the chips will have 256Mb of both types. Note the big and small "b". It means the chips have 32megabytes each of flash and SDRAM. That's still nearly three times as much as its nearest competitor.