The usual ‘leaked mobile phone’ rumours always get me excited, so when I was tipped off by one of our ‘anonymous’ readers that there was a new Samsung phone, named as the ‘Loches’ floating in the midst of the dark mobile phone underground, I just had to get straight onto the case to find out what all the hype was about.
Rumours are that the Samsung Loches, was leaked as the S8300 before Christmas but has now actually been given the name as the Loches. So after doing a bit of searching on Google here’s what I found out about it.
The samsungloches.com domain has a blurry image (see left) of a phone and a link at the bottom to an advertising agency - a tell tale sign that the site is being set up in preparation for a launch in the near future. The domain was first registered in December just before the S8300 information was leaked.
Some of the specs were made available in a post on GSM Arena which has now been deleted but was visible via the Google cache
The Loches is a 12.8mm thick slider handset with a black and orange colour scheme. Reminds me of Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones, however their use of orange was a bit more subtle! It has a duralumin body with anti-scratch and anti-fingerprint coating. It features a 2.8inch OLED touch screen with a WQVGA resolution and 16 million colours, as well as a 12-key keypad.
It uses Samsung's TouchWiz finger friendly interface, featuring various widgets for a customisable home screen and has an accelerometer for auto rotating webpages, camera, pictures, etc.
It's a 3G handset with HSPDA support, topping speeds of 7.2Mbps. It features GPS and Bluetooth 2.1, 2.0 + EDR with A2DP. Now I didn't see any mention of USB… but seriously, what handset doesn't have it these days?!
It's said to have an on board memory of 60GB and is expandable via a microSD expansion slot.
It features an 8.1 megapixel camera with autofocus and dual-LED flash for photos and video recording.
It has a music player, so one would assume that it supports MP3 playback (amongst other formats) and it also supports DIVX files so you can watch top quality movies on the large screen.
It also features an FM radio with RDS as well as games, organisers, and various applications.
I love the design of the phone, not so much the colour scheme (why orange?!), but I love a large, vibrant touch screen and the keypad makes texting and emailing easier for those who can't get to grips with virtual keypads and keyboards.
Now obviously this is all very much unofficial, however, Samsung will be holding a press conference at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona on February 16th, so we assume that the S8300 will probably be announced here. Rumours have it that the phone will be going on sale in March, however keep your eyes peeled and when we hear more, you'll be first to know.
So… what are your thoughts? Let us know! Are we just getting sucked into the hype and rumours or is it all true?
Photo sources: More images below of the rumoured Samsung Loches from Daily Mobile
