Gizmodo: Soul

Samsung's Soulb is Soul-Like in Spirit, But with B-Grade

Kit Eaton — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:15:00 EDT

Not so many weeks ago Blam was complimenting the Samsung Soul cellphone for its clever OLED touchpad, and already Samsung is capitalizing on the Soul name with a new phone. But the Soulb isn't a patch on the original "Spirit of Ultra" phone. Instead it's kind of a B-grade pale echo: that neat haptic touchpad is gone and the cellphone is a candybar instead of a slider, with a single keypad.

It's still got the metallic body, in five colors—Soul Grey, Platinum Silver, Metallic Black, Soul Pink, Amethyst Violet and Red—which may please the fashion-conscious. And it has a 2-inch QVGA TFT screen, 3-megapixel cam with "PowerLED" light, full HTML browser, document viewing app, Bluetooth v2.0, MP3 player, FM RDS recordable radio and 1GB of internal memory with microSD expansion.

But it's just a sleek, metal candybar phone with high specs... much like a boat load of other cellphones out there. It's on sale in Germany at first, then most of Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, so we've no word on when it'll come to the US. [Samsung]

Samsung Entertained Us Enough to Post Their Commercial

Mark Wilson — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

You got us, Samsung. We're suckers for optical illusions, and your "10 Optical Illusions in 2 Minutes" is—even with the Soul advertisement—extremely entertaining. So we're not going to feel used as we post a commercial without any clever commentary picking it apart. Though, to be honest, our brains are still hurting too much from the faces trick to write much of anything. It's just too bad that you clearly hate homosexuals. [via engadget]

What the Samsung Soul's Haptic OLED Touchscreen Soul Patch Is Like

Brian Lam — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:25 EST

The Samsung Soul tries, and largely succeeds at making a touchscreen 5 way navpad. Like the Maximus Optimus keyboard, the controller is backlit by an OLED screen (this one is a two color deal) that changes icons depending on the context:

In the media player, you get FF/RW and play/pause controls; in the calculator, you get plus, minus, subtract and divide buttons. The soul patch (my name) even vibrates when you click it, thanks to the same Immersion tech found in Playstation and Wii rumble controllers. Congrats to Samsung in making a touch UI that overcomes some of the shortcomings of touchscreen controls in a nice looking package.

Samsung Soul Has Mighty Morphing Touchpad Display

Haroon Malik — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:55:50 EST

Samsung's Ultra Edition range will get a revamp with their new Soul, a 7.2Mbps HSDPA cellphone which, at only 12.9mm thick, it comes with auto focus 5MP camera, 2.2" 320 x 240 pixel full-color display, SD slot and a touchpad display system that will morph the user interface, changing icons according to the application you are using. For example, in music mode playback controls will appear, but whilst sending an SMS these will be replaced with editing functions. The rest of the specs are quite nice too.

[Akihabara]