Samsung Corby II local release soon

MANILA, Philippines - Samsung will make available next month the new Corby II touch-screen mobile phone in colorful back covers and with enhanced features that include Wi-Fi, a bigger screen and enhanced social networking connectivity.

Corby II follows the success of the 2009 Corby that was a hit among the young crowd who go for fun colors and features. The Corby II is available in yellow, pink and white back covers and comes with integrated apps, Social Hub and mFluent, that will give users different ways to communicate. Popular social networking platforms have also been preloaded on the Corby II.

The Corby II is a feature phone with a smartphone feel to it. It sports a 3.14-inch TFT-LCD display — up from 2.8-inch in the first model — where users can experience Samsung’s enhanced TouchWiz interface that delivers multiple home screens and easy-to-use menu.

Corby II, just like its predecessor, is designed for people who want a feature phone with the luxury of a touch screen but still not as expensive as a high-end smartphone. Priced at P4,990, the Corby II covers the basics when it comes to camera (two-megapixel), video (QVGA at 15 frames per second), and audio (MP3, AAC and Windows formats).

There’s a ready 26MB memory on the phone that can be complemented by a microSD (up to 16GB) to hold user-generated files that can be shared or transferred to other devices via Bluetooth 3.0 and USB 2.0 connections.

Meanwhile, the global mobile phone market is still dominated by feature phones, according to market research firm Gartner Inc. Smartphones are increasingly becoming popular but of the 417.1 million units shipped in the third quarter of last year, only 80.5 million or less than 20 percent were smartphones, Gartner said.

A feature phone like the Corby II, given its smartphone bearing, has an advantage to tap both markets and help people decide whether they’ll keep using feature phones or soon move up to smartphones.