Yesterday Samsung formally announced its Genio line of budget, youth-orientated handsets. We already knew about the Genio Touch, but Samsung also launched two more models, the Genio Qwerty and Genio Pro, as well as showing off all three properly for the first time. We'll look at the whole range in detail here.
Before we start we should explain to avoid confusion that the range is known as Corby, not Genio, elsewhere than the UK, while the Genio Qwerty is known as the Corby TXT.
The Genio Touch first up. It's a 2.8-inch haptic feedback touchscreen device. Like the other models, it utilises Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface coupled with a "Cartoon UI" skin as you can see from our pictures. It's a 2.5G handset with EDGE compatibility. The lack of 3G may surprise, but this handset has been designed to hit a very low price point.
Unlike the other two models, there's no 3.5mm headphone jack on the Genio Touch, but there is the ability to plug in an included adapter for music or the integrated FM radio. MicroSD is the supported storage card, but there is a 50MB internal memory.
The camera isn't brilliant at a lowly 2 megapixels, but Samsung has designed this to be an extremely cheap handset – it'll most likely be free on even budget contracts. The touchscreen interface is slick and user-friendly, even if the screen needs a definite touch rather than anything gentler.
All the Genio models make use of what Samsung calls 'fashion jackets' – you can buy the phone in one of four colours – Jamaican yellow, festival orange, minimal white and cupid pink – while you can adapt your handset from a choice of different designed battery covers should you wish to. Sounds like a Nokia 3210? Yep, that's what we thought (and with the Nokia you could change the front, too).
Aside from our sniggering though, the Genio Touch is clearly here to serve a purpose – a fun, functional and cheap handset aimed at those who don't want to get too techy but need to keep in touch. Samsung will shift bucketloads.
