Touchscreen marathon continues with Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH

Today Samsung has officially announced their latest high-end phone, the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH. The fully touch-operated slider has decided to avoid the crowd at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and appear a week earlier. With the LG KM900 Arena also appearing today we are not quite sure how much of a good decision that is.

The key features naturally include the 2.8" OLED scratch-resistant touchscreen display with WQVGA resolution (240 x 400 pixels). Unlike most other touchscreen devices the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH a.k.a. Samsung Tocco Ultra uses the capacitive technology, as with the Apple iPhone 3G and LG KF900 Prada.

Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH

Dressed to impress with a slim 12.7 mm body and a finely brushed metal frame, the S8300 UltraTOUCH also has the features to do so. The handset comes with an 8MP autofocus camera with dual-LED flash that can capture videos up to VGA resolution at 30fps. Next are the built-in GPS with A-GPS support, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP, microUSB and the microSD memory card slot. FM radio with RDS is also on board, making Wi-Fi the only major abscence here.

However the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH partially compensates for that with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE as well as 3G with HSDPA (7.2Mbps) support. The handset also comes with the sweet DviX and XviD support, meaning that you don’t have to convert your favorite videos to mp4 for watching them on it.

Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH will run on the latest reincarnation of the company’s proprietary TouchWiz user interface. It brings quite a number of improvements over the previous edition including new widgets, three homescreens and an improved image gallery.

The enhanced TouchWiz user interface on S8300

You will be able to get a better idea of the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH in the coming day with our preview. While we are still doing some i-dotting and t-crossing here are several live photos of the device for a teaser.

Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH at our office

The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH is expected to hit the market in March 2009 with an estimated price of 329 euro.