Samsung Pixon 8MP touchscreen camera-phone announced

Samsung have announced their latest touchscreen 3G cellphone, the Pixon, complete with a 3.2-inch 240 x 400 WQVGA touchscreen, 7.2Mbps HSDPA (2100MHz) and an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus.  Measuring 13.8mm thick, Samsung have proclaimed the Pixon to be "the world's slimmest full-touch 8-megapixel camera phone", which unless I'm mistaken is a pretty sparsely populated niche to begin with.

The camera boasts many of the features currently found in Samsung's standalone point & shoot range, including Advanced Shake Reduction, Wide Dynamic Range, face detection and smile shot.  There's also geotagging, but no internal GPS is mentioned so it seems this is either done manually or via cell-tower triangulation. 

Running the latest version of Samsung's TouchWiz OS (though not Windows Mobile, as with the Omnia), the Pixon has a new photo browser with accelerometer-controlled screen rotation.  There's also a media player, FM radio with RDS, video capture of up to 30 fps D1 (720 x 480) or 120 fps QGVA, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0. Internal storage is 200MB and can be expanded with microSD cards.

The Samsung Pixon will go on sale in France in mid-October, followed by most European and Asian countries; price is yet to be announced. There's no word on when – or even if – the company is planning a US version.