Wandering the streets of Barcelona last night I spied this giant Samsung billboard advertising three new phones that should be unveiled this week: Omnia HD, Ultra Touch, and Beat. I've heard tell of all three devices before (Beat DJ is that new touchscreen music store developed in conjunction with high-end audio gear maker Bang and Olufsen) and managed to get a bit of juice on the Ultra Touch (Ultra Tocco), in particular.
The Ultra Touch S8300 is a 12.7mm slim touchscreen slider phone with an 8MP camera. The camera optics and flash are housed on the back of the device and are concealed when the phone is "slid shut," so to speak. Someone who's used the device said that its most eye-catching feature is its 2.8" AMOLED display, which is "amazingly bright" and shows "colors that just pop ... really pop." The display is capable of showing16 million colors at 400x240 pixels, and has full haptic touch feedback and will run Samsung's TouchWiz interface.
Speaking of TouchWiz, Sammy's newborn UI gets a much-needed update this week, as well. TouchWiz's first upgrade brings Web-ready widgets (like an RSS reader) to the system, and will be accompanied by an online widget store and development kit for widget programmers.