The young crowd wanting a serious looking handset with some fun on it is sure to find the new Samsung Genio Qwerty or the Samsung B3210 a good place to start. It sports a Blackberry-esque QWERTY candy bar form factor with half its body pointing to a more playful fun with interchangeable cover colors initially in vibrant yellow when it hits the markets this November.
Coming hot on the heels of its other Genio siblings like the Genio Touch and Genio Pro models targeted to the high and middle markets, the Samsung Genio Qwerty is designed to cover the low end with a set of modest features that makes you wonder if Samsung had the blueprint of the model drafted 2 years ago.
At least it looks upscale with a Blackberry look-alike full QWERTY form factor. What betrays that it isn’t a Blackberry is its vibrant yellow back cover. Samsung has obviously targeted the young and hip crowd that just loves to get their toys personalized. Having interchangeable back covers in differing colours puts some fun on otherwise stern looking Blackberry-esque front styling.
Modesty aside, it’s still quite Modest
One can’t be faulted to thinking that Samsung must have somehow resurrected a 2-year old design for a mobile phone and just given it a new body. The low end markets won’t also be faulted if they find other better value handsets out there delivering a more updated set of features for the same price or even lower. But for kids who want a mobile phone that looks like what their dads or moms are using, assuming they’re using Blackberrys, then this is the right one for them.
For starters, it’s not even 3G – a feature that’s almost a must-have when you’re on the net while on the road. Even as a messaging phone that only transmits text characters on email, instant messaging and emails, let alone social networking sites like Facebook that Samsung claims the handset supports, a 3G network still comes in handy.
Without WiFi, you won’t even get to socialize remotely from a hotspot. The Genio Qwerty is just a 2.5G mobile phone that was respectable 2 years ago. It still is, of course, you just need to have more patience when using it.
From what can be gathered online, the Genio Qwerty sports a 2.2-inch QVGA TFT display on a landscape default orientation typical of a small QWERTY handset. It’s got a 2.0 megapixel camera with video recording. There’s a stereo FM radio as well as media players for all the popular media content formats that complete its multimedia features. 37MB is all you get for internal storage, but you also get microSD expansion support for up to 8GB. Talk about a 2-year old design specs.
Availability
Either Samsung or Orange should be releasing some tariff information soon after the Genio line had been officially released last month and the Genio Qwerty last week. Samsung has plainly designed a mobile handset that looks expensive on the outside but should fetch budget level prices. With its modest and dated feature set, expect Orange to offer this free on a minimal contract that could start this November.
Samsung Genio Qwerty Links:
Tags: Samsung-Genio-Qwerty