When Cell Phones Meet Camcorders

Camera phones could become outdated very soon as the enhancement of mobile phones' multimedia functions continue. The latest offering is Samsung's Anycall SCH-V330, a mobile phone with a camcorder function embedded.

Samsung Electronics, which is part of Korean conglomerate Samsung Group , introduced the SCH-V300 early this year and it has been enjoying slow but steady growth. The company unveiled a second camcorder phone, the SCH-V310, only a month later, in line with its efforts to provide a stream of high-tech devices at a rapid pace.

Camcorder phones allow users to shoot video clips with audio, in addition to shooting still pictures. Video clips can be stored for later use.

The 300,000-pixel camcorder features two power-zoom lenses with nine settings, and can shoot up to 30 minutes of video clips (19 megabytes) at 11 frames per second. The phone plays clips back on a high-quality TFT-LCD screen that can reproduce 262,000 color shades and with SRS WOW technology, which creates surround-sound effects.

Another impressive function is the Live Screen service, which allows users to set recorded video clips as their screen backgrounds or use a downloaded music video as the background. Previously, only a still picture or a moving cartoon image could be used as the background. And these fabulous functions only take one click on the phone's camcorder icon.

What's next? Samsung is planning to introduce an updated, sleeker-looking camcorder phone in the coming months with enlarged storage memory. The new phone will have the capability to shoot video clips that are up to one hour long, says the company. The new model will feature a 1 million-pixel camcorder, which is good enough to help the company steal not-so-serious camcorder users from the camcorder market.

Although the SCH-V330 isn't yet available in the U.S., a similar phone by Nokia is. The Nokia 3650 can capture up to 20 seconds of video and audio clips. To use these features, users must subscribe to a phone service with T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telecom , or Cingular Wireless, a joint venture between SBC Communications and BellSouth . The phone costs around $100 to $150 after rebate.

Correction: A previous version of this story indicated that Samsung intended to launch the SCH-V330 in the United States next month. Samsung Telecommunications America now says that no U.S. launch date has been set for the camcorder phone.