As much as smartphones have done to advance the fine arts of communication and handheld web surfing, the main thing we’ve been missing since the flip phone era is the satisfying THWACK! of ending a phone call. You just can’t hang up authoritatively with a smartphone. “Did you see that guy jam his thumb against his iPhone? Oooooh, he must be mad!!”
I’m not sure how many slickly-named Hennessy flip phones Samsung will be able to sell, but for a company whose Galaxy line of products features a skillion different makes, models and screen sizes, the idea here is probably that — hey — maybe there are some people out there who want to go back to flip phones without giving up too many smartphone features.
This isn’t exactly a state of the art smartphone/flip phone hybrid, mind you. It’s running a somewhat older version of Android (last year’s 4.1 Jelly Bean), and the two 3.3-inch touchscreens (yes, there are two — one on the outside and one on the inside) each feature a resolution of just 320 by 480 pixels. But there’s a quad-core processor under the hood and a gigabyte of RAM, which ought to make the phone perform smoothly. And perhaps more importantly, there’s an old-timey numeric dialing pad.
If you’re feeling nostalgic enough to explore a potential purchase of this device, I’m afraid I have some bad news: For now, it’s apparently only available in China. Who knows, though? Maybe this will become a trend.
Samsung brings back the flip phone, unveils the Hennessy featuring two 3.3-inch displays [Pocket-lint]