NEW YORK (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (005930.KS) plans
to introduce a mobile telephone with high-speed Internet links in the
United States in the first quarter of next year, an executive said on
Thursday.
Peter Skarzynski, a Samsung vice president for mobile phones, said the
phone would be based on EV-DO, a high-speed technology that Verizon
Wireless are building into their networks.
Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. mobile provider, has said it would
begin to market high-speed services to consumers when its first EV-DO
phones go on sale next year but it has not yet revealed a launch date
or named its device suppliers.
Verizon now uses EV-DO technology in a number of U.S. markets to
deliver the Internet to business customers via laptop computers at
speeds similar to home broadband links.
Samsung's Skarzynski was speaking at a event where Samsung displayed
several phones it plans to deliver to U.S. consumers in the coming
months. He declined to give specific details about Samsung's first
high-speed U.S. phone and did not say which service provider would
sell the product.
Samsung showed two EV-DO phones with computer features that it expects
to launch in the United States around the middle of 2005.
Its i730 EV-DO phone has a large screen and a keyboard that users can
slide out from inside the phone when they want to type messages or
e-mails. The i640 EV-DO phone has a keyboard that can be attached to
the phone when the user wants to type.
Samsung also unveiled its p735 phone, which has a high resolution
camera and music player and will go on sale by year end at the
fourth-biggest U.S. provider T-Mobile USA -- owned by Germany's
Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE).
It expects to sell its RL-A760 phone to Sprint (FON.N) also by year
end. This phone has walkie-talkie style capability and voice
recognition technology that will let users dial phone numbers by
saying the name of the person they want to call.
Samsung plans to sell another phone in the first quarter aimed at
people who use their phones to play video games. The n330 has a screen
that can be made bigger for game playing and can be set to vibrate at
key points during a game.
It did not reveal prices.
Samsung is the world's third largest mobile phone maker but is only
about 500,000 phone sales away from taking the No. 2 position from
Motorola Inc. according to analysts.
It is expected to provide about 20 percent of the roughly 100 million
mobile handsets to be sold in the United States this year.
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