Samsung Jet: The UK's fastest smartphone?

At its 'Unpacked' event here in London and numerous cities worldwide, Samsung has introduced its latest fully touchscreen phone -- the Samsung Jet. It's packing a 79mm (3.1-inch) AMOLED screen running at an impressive 800x480-pixel resolution, a 5-megapixel camera and, so Samsung says, a processor that makes the Jet the fastest fully touchscreen phone on the market.

That'll be the work of an 800MHz chip, then. Odd, since Toshiba's fully touchscreen TG01 phone has a 1GHz Qualcomm chip. But that ain't on the shelves in the U of K yet, and until we test and review both contenders, we shall not judge. For further comparison, the supposedly much-improved iPhone 3G S has been revealed to use a 600MHz chip.

So let's move on. Samsung is pitching speed and power as the Jet's key selling points, and the 3.6Mbps data connection highlights this by being significantly slower than the 7.2Mbps speed many phones are capable of in the UK, including Sony Ericsson's forthcoming Satio and the 3G S.

But the Jet looks like a stunning smart phone otherwise, with what could be one of the best screens on the market for watching mobile video, and a metric tonne of cool multimedia features besides -- support for high-quality H.264, DivX and Xvid video, for example, iTunes Plus compatibility and a 3.5mm headphone socket, that 5-megapixel autofocusing camera, Microsoft Exchange support, Wi-Fi, a questionable 2GB of internal storage (expandable with microSD cards) and GPS navigation.

Safe to say, when it comes to high-end phones, Samsung's really beginning to leapfrog Nokia in our estimations these days, and the Jet looks like a stunning rival to the N97 one of us hates so dearly. We'll be wheeling the Jet in-house for review as soon as possible, and all being well it'll be on sale in the UK later this month.