That’s the new Samsung AnyCall Haptic SCH-W420 pictured above.  I don’t know the why / how / who behind Samsung’s drab naming conventions for so many of their phones, but I’m going to consider starting to use them for random password generation.

The name might be a mouthful, but the phone looks like it’s quite a nice handful.  Its specs include: 16:9, 3.2-inch screen, DMB, a 2 megapixel camera and Bluetooth 2.0.  That big screen not only uses touch, but also provides haptic feedback – "in the form of vibrations help out with the UI".

The phone’s interface is driven by Samsung’s own new ToucWhiz custom UI.  I just watched a couple of quick video demos of the UI and it looks quite promising, and pretty good looking as well.

A few things I noticed when watching the demo:

Home screen uses widgets
You can drag widgets around the home screen freely – does not seem to have a rigid grid or rows for them to sit within – that’s a plus.
Wallpaper switching looked very easy – with very few taps, not buried in menus and sub-menus.
Tap a phonebook icon and it goes straight to a search bar = very nice.
Flicking looked a bit weird – didn’t look like iPhone style flicking – looks like maybe you have to make quite a quick flicking action and also remove your finger from the screen quite quickly???
Messaging app shows T9 as the preferred way to input text = yuck!

The AnyCall Haptic SCH-W420 is due to launch in Korea, at around $700-800.  At that sort of price, it will need to be very pretty and that UI will needs to work very, very well.  No word on whether this phone is likely to make it to North America, Europe, other markets anytime soon – but hopefully this new TouchWhiz UI will keep getting developed and applied on some other devices.

Take a look at the TouchWhiz UI video HERE, and let us know what you think of it …

Via: Engadget Mobile

Tags: Samsung, AnyCall Haptic, SCH-W420, TouchWhiz, UI, touchscreen smartphones