Once you get a phone to 12 megapixels, it’s almost (depending upon features) not worth owning a digital camera ‘ because that’s largely the design point that most cameras saturate at, although Sony has a few Cybershots above that level.
And given that Samsung has always pushed hard to have the highest megapixel camera on the market (not that the phones always produce the best picture results) it’s not a great surprise that days after Sony Ericsson stole the megapixel crown with its Satio, ready for 4th quarter delivery, with a 12.1 megapixel camera, that Samsung has followed suit.
The announcement has really only happened in Korea and Japan, but European delivery dates were claimed ahead of the Sony Ericsson device launched as the Pixon 12 M8910.
The specification is very similar to the Satio, although we noted that the Satio spec did not have genuine GPS, only A-GPS, as far as we can tell since GPS was nowhere on the spec sheet we saw for the Satio. It looks like both of them will begin to eat into the Sony Cybershot market.
Both are touch screens and both push the idea that the camera can be triggered with one button push, and both shoot high quality video and have Wi-Fi and HSUPA, but the Samsung Pixon 12 has a 3.1 inch Amoled screen (the Satio was LCD was 3.5 inches but had a slightly lower resolution) and we understand it will bring the device out in Europe by the end of June just to frustrate, and elsewhere at the end of August.
This is clearly Samsung unrelentingly chasing Sony Ericsson and not giving it a chance to rest in one of its strongest territories, Europe, to the extent that it will rush it to market ahead of Sony. Our feeling is that the Sony Ericsson will have all the wonderful Walkman features along with the Cybershot features and will actually be a far better phone than the Pixon 12. At present Samsung has a Pixon 8 and the Tocco, both with 8-megapixels which were strong in Europea last year, and this looks not to be a brand new phone, but just a camera upgrade. But if it has all the same features and ends up cheaper, it will still put considerable margin pressure on the Satio when negotiating operator deals.
The Satio has Facebook and YouTube pre-loaded and a genuinely strong web browser, while the Samsung Pixon 12 will offer instant upload to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket.
Details of the phone were carried on Akihabara News, a Tokyo webs site, so this looks most of the details have come from the Japanese press launch, so we’re not too sure we believe those launch dates for Europe, we’ll have to see.