David Carey
Mobile Handset DesignLine

Teardowns at our company try to follow trends all over the world and to be sure, not all new-product experimentation happens equally. As with Japan's frequently localized product trials, Korea too presents an environment with the consumer base and technological sophistication needed try out ideas within a geographic focus before potential release to a broader global audience.

The Samsung SPH-P9000 is just such a regional gadget, featuring a Windows XP-based PC melded into something closer to an overgrown smart-phone format. The SPH-9000 uses a folding "butterfly" keyboard combined with a swiveling 5-in. 800 x 480 (WVGA) display adequate to shoehorn in the graphical environment for a full-blown PC interface. Nevertheless, at under 600 grams and with dimensions of about 100 x 144 x 33 mm when folded, the SPH-9000 is small enough to stow away in areas that would challenge the emerging "netbook" designs flooding world markets. Sold only in the Korean market, the P9000 connects to conventional 10/100 Ethernet but adds a rich set of wireless options.

Most notable and novel in connectivity is Samsung's provision for WiBro networks. While far from ubiquitous, WiMax--a close cousin to the more widely known WiMax broadband option--holds promise for higher bandwidth and more mobile-friendly data options. WiBro and WiMax both offer many of the benefits of traditional WiFi and wide-area-wireless networks (WAN), supporting over a megabit/second user data rates while offering hand-off capability approaching that of cellular WAN and largely unavailable in a WiFi setting.

However, Samsung's experimentation didn't limit the wireless options to just-emerging standards, and the WiBro connectivity is joined up with more widely deployed CDMA/EVDO for WAN capability as well. In short, there are two competent wireless pipes into the SPH-9000, which is fundamentally a Windows PC folded and shrunk into a highly mobile package.