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Nuggets: Minature mobile phone... on a watch!

Nuggets, twice a day, every day (well, we do our best!). Software, hardware and every gadget we can get our mits on...
Written by Justin Pearse, Contributor

Forget James Bond, remember Dick?

Now this is cool. Remember Dick Tracy?

Remember his watchphone and wishing you had one? Well now you can, almost. Electronics giant Samsung is just about to bring to market its SPH-WP10 watch phone -- although you can guarantee they'll have a much more headline-friendly name for it soon (if not we'll add it to our worst product name list of 1999).

A hybrid concoction combining a digital watch with a wireless phone, it's made up of a miniature duplexer, even smaller base-band analogue processor chip and a teeny-tiny fixed antenna. Samsung says it's the smallest and lightest wireless terminal ever made, and at 67 x 58 x 20 mm x 39g they're probably right. You get 90 minutes continuous call time, with 60 hours of standbys. Despite its size it'll have most of the features of slightly less futuristic phones, including voice activated dialling, phone directory, ear microphone, vibration alert and a graphic LCD screen.

Want one now? Tough, you'll have to move to Korea. The phone is CDMA rather than GSM so it won't work here. However, and this is far from official, Samsung may be persuaded to release a GSM version if the Korean market laps it up. So we can start dreaming just as those Korean chaps are picking one off the shelf.


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