Samsung unveiled their new Android phone in Barcelona this week, the Samsung i8520 Beam. The i8520 has a 3.7 inch WVGA Super AMOLED display, 8MP camera with flash and auto-focus, 720p video recording, HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi, an 1800mAH battery, 16GB of internal memory plus a microSD expansion slot. It’ll also be running Android 2.1. But the addition to this phone that’s got people talking is the built-in pico projector, which is sure to attract interest and will undoubtedly be the phone’s big selling point.
But, where the projector is impressing the critics, Samsung’s decision to customise Android to Bada-ify the UI and use an Android version of their TouchWiz system hasn’t gone down quite as well. Samsung claim they want to bring some sort of uniformity to their handsets by having them all running similar interfaces, which is an understandable enough goal, but the TouchWiz system isn’t exactly setting the heather alight, and, is arguably worse than the stock Android interface.