Samsung and Sprint are introducing the Samsung UpStage at CTIA in Orlando this week and are no doubt hoping to upstage the iPhone. With a $150 price tag when you take out a 2 year contract the UpStage is a much more affordable option than the iPhone.
The UpStage is a super slim candybar handset about the same size as an iPod Nano. The innovative feature of the UpStage is that it has two faces – one face for phone functions and one for multimedia.
With a 1.4 inch colour screen on the phone side and a 2.1 inch screen on the multimedia side the Samsung will be very easy to use. A Flip button on the edge of the unit toggles the display between phone and music player.
PC World got their hands on an UpStage and seemed to like it:
The UpStage felt small but solid in my hand; I found its keypad quite usable, and the sound quality on voice calls was generally good. The four-way capacitive touchpad on the music side has a central, mechanical play button that took some getting used to. The excellent documentation (including a printed manual of over 300 pages) warns against trying to swipe it in a circle the way you would an iPod’s control wheel, but the temptation is hard to resist. It also took a while for me to stop trying to use the central button for directional navigation (instead of tapping the touchpad above, below, or to either side of the button).
