Samsung and Korea must have a love affair with the nostalgic flip phone (or clamshell, if you prefer) as the Korean equivalent of our FCC, Tenna, has given its blessing to yet another Samsung Flip Phone, known only as the W2014. In August we reported on the Samsung Hennessy flip phone – a new take on an old idea, before touchscreen phones were all the rage. It surprised us all and with specifications like below, this was not your father’s flip phone:
- Two 3.3-inch 320—480 touch screens
- 1.2 Ghz Quad-Core CPU
- 1GB of RAM
- microSD card slot
- 5 Megapixel rear-facing camera
- Android 4.1 with TouchWiz
- 1,5000 mAh Battery
But then, just a couple weeks later, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Golden, which was geared toward the older user, allowing them to run it in “Easy Mode,” it could monitor your health, and even had “business card recognition” software to place the information from a business card into your contacts and even came with an FM radio. Samsung upped the specs to:
- Two 3.7-inch 320—480 touch screens
- 1.7 Ghz Dual-Core CPU
- 8 Megapixel rear-facing camera
- Android 4.2 with TouchWiz
No sales figures were ever released by Samsung regarding their flip phones, but apparently they sold well enough in the Asian market to warrant yet another new, high-end, flip phone known as W2014. Other than the screen resolution, the specifications would rival most high-end touchscreen phones today – with a Snapdragon 800 processor, running at 2.3GHz! According to sources, it is packing 2GB of RAM and a 13MP camera, and to top it off, it will be running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean! Not bad at all for a flip phone and nothing like the flip phones when I was younger.
- 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, quad-core processor
- Dual WVGA 3.67-inch 480 x 800 touch displays
- 2GB of RAM
- 13MP main camera
- 2MP FFC
- Dual SIM card slots
- Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac w/ Bluetooth v4.0
- 4.3 Android Jelly Bean
- 116.85 x 59.4 x 15.79 mm, 173g
- Color: Gold
Samsung continues to add to their behemoth collection of phones, making every size and configuration as possible. I have said it before and I will say it again – I really believe a flip phone of this caliber would sell well in the US. They are a lot of people, my wife included, that would grab one of those old flip phones up. Many older people do not want a touchscreen phone, they want the physical buttons and smaller size the flip phone can offer…but chances this will ever come to the US is slim and flip.