It seems that South Korea-based Samsung Electronics is missing the good old days of mobile phone design. The days when you didn’t have to try and build the most capable device possible with the most cutting edge design on the market. Such is the company’s yearning for yesteryear that it has actually decided to revisit what used to be popular by introducing a new range of flip phones, as outlined by a recent filing with China’s TENAA. It’s sleek, it’s actually rather beautiful, but it’s 2015, and it’s still essentially a Samsung flip phone.
Samsung has really made a conscious effort over the last twelve months to improve its design game. Its Galaxy S series of devices that are powered by the Android platform have proven to be extremely popular over the years. With that said, it’s only really been with the launch of the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge and Galaxy Note 5 that Samsung has really started to class design and physical appearance of the hardware as being extremely important. That new found design importance seems to have been migrated across to this new flip phone series.
So, what exactly is Samsung proposing with the leaked SM-W2016 flip phone that’s managed to find its way into the public domain? Samsung is proposing a clamshell design that features two 3.9-inch Super AMOLED displays that live on either side of the clamshell cover. Each of those displays carries a 1280 x 768 pixel resolution that is capable of displaying photographs captured on the integrated 16-megapixel rear-facing camera. And guess what? Yup, that’s right, there’s also a “physical” keypad, just like they used to be.
The proposed hardware is so slouch from a technical perspective. The included 3GB of RAM ships with an accompanying 64-bit Exynos 7420 processor and an internal 64GB of storage. Samsung will also distribute the device with Android 5.1 Lollipop installed as default. The metallic casing and rather beautiful sleek design weighs in at 204 grams and is just 15.1mm in thickness when closed. It’s unknown if Samsung has performed any real-world market research to see if there’s a consumer demand for this type of device, but it’s running with it regardless.
There’s no official word from Sammy on release dates, price, or release territories for that matter, but we’ll be sure to bring more on this one when it becomes official.
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