Samsung i620 (SGH-i620) Preview

The Samsung i620 (SGH-i620) has yet to be officially announced by Samsung, but it follows closely in the pattern of the Samsung i600 which allows us to draw some conclusions about the SGH-i620's technical specifications.

However, the first thing to notice is that this is a very unusual looking device - the "squashed" look that you can see in the photo on the right isn't a sizing error.. as far as we can tell, the SGH-i620 is a wide and squat phone at around 59mm across by 94mm tall when closed, opening up to a 131mm device with a QWERTY keyboard using a sliding mechanism. Samsung have clearly tried to keep the i620's layout as simple and as elegant as possible when it is closed - there's a sort of iPod-esque simplicity to it.

Open the Samsung i620 up and there's a fairly ugly but practical looking QWERTY keyboard in a layout similar to the classic BlackBerry. The keys appear to be well spaced and ergonomically arranged, indicating that Samsung have concentrated more on function than style with the SGH-i620's main keypad.


There are two cameras on the SGH-i620, so this is a 3G phone like the i600. We also know that it supports tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) and has a two megapixel camera with flash. There's a wide 320x240 pixel display too, which is a more practical arrangement for a smartphone than the typical "tall" display found on other phones.

Assuming that this is an updated slider version of the i600, we expect the Samsung i620 to support HSDPA (3.5G) data in addition to UMTS (3G) and come with 802.11b and g WiFi capabilities. This should be a Windows Mobile 6.0 device with a wide range of supported multimedia formats, and this would mean that the SGH-i620 also comes with the usual array of Windows Mobile software. Stereo Bluetooth and microSD expandable memory are also to be expected. There are a lot of assumptions there - as yet there is no official word from Samsung as to the SGH-i620s exact technical specifications, and some of these could be wrong.

The design of the Samsung i620 is certainly appealing. If you're not using the QWERTY keyboard, then the simple controls allow access to most of the phone's functions without opening it up.. and if you want to type then the sliding keyboard is a no-compromise approach that may well give the best of both worlds.

Price, availability and the exact specification of the Samsung i620 are not known at the time of going to press.