Samsung Unveils Multimedia Mobile Phone SoulSamsung Unveils Multimedia Mobile Phone Soul

Samsung has a new flagship mobile phone called Soul, which reflects the device maker's new vision. The ultraslim, multifunctional phone will make its debut at next week's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona.

Soul is short for "the spirit of ultra" and is part of Samsung's Ultra Edition series of phones, which offer a balance of design and features, the company said. The series includes other ultraslim models, such as the D900 and the U600.

"The fundamental direction of the design concept development was to keep 'the epitome of self-discipline' by minimizing all the factors to a simple [yet] beautiful device," said Minhyouk Lee, Samsung's senior mobile device designer, in a statement.

Soul is only 12.9 mm (about 0.5 inches) thin and comes with a 5-megapixel camera and camcorder, equipped with advanced capabilities such as face detection, image stabilization, and Wide Dynamic Range.

The quad-band phone uses a high-speed cellular technology known as High Speed Downlink Packet Access, which means users can access the Internet from the phone at speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, according to Samsung. Soul is capable of receiving pictures, video, music, and other multimedia. It has expandable memory, so large files can be stored on a MicroSD card.

Soul features Samsung's new series of graphic user interfaces that users can change depending on their personal style and taste, as well as create "skins" that are customizable with images, fonts, and colors.

The phone also adapts to the application that is running through Magic Touch technology -- it changes the navigation indicators on the keypad. So when the phone is in music mode, music-related icons light up on the navigation indicators; in camera mode, camera-related icons light up, including zoom and brightness.

Motorola recently introduced a similar concept with ModeShift, a technology that transforms a phone into a music player, a camera, or a basic phone with the press of a button. Motorola's Rokr E8 music-centric phone is the first to use ModeShift, which is taking the company in a whole new direction with its phone design.

Soul initially will become available in Europe starting in April.