From Seoul comes Soul, Samsung's new handset

Samsung unveiled its newest flagship handset and member of its "Ultra Edition" family, a line which seeks to provide the slimmest phones in attractive designs: The Soul.

The standout feature of this slider is the "Magical Touch" panel, produced by DaCP. A small panel beneath the 2.2" QVGA screen changes and adapts its functions in response to which application is running. For example, while running the MP3 player, it can act as the media control interface, or while using SMS functions, it can manipulate text.

This 3G device comes with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, image stabilization and face detection, an FM radio, Bluetooth 2.0, a media player, and a Bang and Olufson ICEpower amplifier.

Also especially noteworthy in such a small device is its HSDPA Internet connectivity offering as high as a 7.2 Mbps downlink speed. This speed is complemented by a suite of "2.0" features such as a mobile blogging application, an RSS reader, and GMail optimization.

Senior designer Minhyouk Lee somewhat cryptically described the Soul's all metal chassis design: "The fundamental direction of the design concept development of Soul was to keep 'the epitome of self-discipline' by minimizing all the factors to a simple yet beautiful device."