Posted by Mike Evans in Coming Soon on April 29, 2009

Samsung I7500 Android phone
Samsung have been rumoured to be working on a new Android phone for some time now, and at last, we’ve got details and pictures of it. Called the Samsung I7500, it looks pretty much what you’d expect: a T-Mobile G1 inside a Samsung body!

The reason for this is that Samsung have done very little to the Android user interface, so it looks pretty much like every other Android phone at the moment. What they have done, though, in true Samsung style, is beef up the hardware feature set.

More details and pictures after the jump.
Samsung I7500 Android phone
When the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, debuted last year, one of the criticisms about it was the hardware provided by HTC. Ugly and underfeatured were just two of the kinder words that were used.

Granted it’s got so many sensors, it’s like a Star Trek tricorder, and with HSDPA, aGPS, and WiFi it’s not exactly under-featured.

However, the camera isn’t great, there’s limited video recording, and you get the general feel that features were not the main focus of HTC when they were developing the phone.

Samsung, however, tend to do thigns differently. With Samsung, features are always at the top of the list! Consequently, with the Samsung I7500, you get 7.2Mbps HSDPA, a 5 megapixel camera, a glorious 3.2″ AMOLED display, a bigger battery (1500mAh compared with the G1’s much too small 1200mAh) and up to 40GB of storage.

None of this is all that mind blowing, of course, but it does help make this new Android phone a much better proposition all round. Indeed, with longer battery life and upgraded features all round, this is one of the better smartphones on the market, irrespective of the underlying operating system.

The only drawback, at least for me, is that there’s no keyboard. However, if that doesn’t worry you, you might want to choose the Samsung I7500 over the new HTC Magic that Vodafone are releasing soon.

Whichever phone you choose, the fact is we now have three different Android phones from two different manufacturers and three different network operators. If you weren’t convinced by the first Android phone, the potential of Android as a platform, at least, is now no longer in doubt.

As more and more companies look to release Android phones, we’ll soon see better hardware and different apps and interfaces bolted onto new phones as the manufacturers seek to differentiate their phones from their competitors’.

The future really is Android’s.

[Source: Gizmodo]