Went to a Samsung do the other day and was intrigued by the display of upcoming smartphones adorning the walls. Not one to miss out on a possible winning technology, the company has cannily opted to produce not one, not two, but three flavours.

The i330 Phoenix is a bigger handset – obviously aimed at the Nokia Communicator crowd – with tri band, Palm OS, touchscreen with Graffiti, address book etc etc. The BlueChip is another Palm based device in a smaller form factor and the last is the Stinger PDA model which uses Microsoft’s WinCE, is tri-band, has a 65K screen and includes all the usual WinCE goodies like WAP email client and browser etc.

The Stinger looks to be quite a nice product, especially if the slot I saw lurking on the right hand side is really an SD card expansion slot. It makes the Sendo look a little old fashioned.

Of course no pricing, launch dates or other reality check information, so they may never actually appear anywhere at all, although I have the feeling that the Phoenix is actually being sold in the US at the moment (or is that the SPH-i300 I’m thinking of?)

Meanwhile here’s a preview of another Palm based smartphone, the Kyocera 7135 with MP3 player and SD slot. US only at the moment though. Update: It also has its own optional keyboard for data entry as shown above.

I’ve still got to say that I believe the Palm OS – and WinCE for that matter – will have a hard time against Symbian in the smartphone market in the long run. Symbian is just so…soo…mobile phone friendly. :-)