The Samsung Memoir has been rumored to make its way to the nation’s newest 3G network for a very, very long time. Starting today, however, it’s available in all of T-Mobile’s retail stores, online, and over the phone. Samsung’s high-end optics on handsets are nothing new, but an 8 megapixel sensor certainly trumps anything available in the U.S. market (sold by a carrier). In terms of raw specs, you’re looking at T-Mobile 3G support, touch screen with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface (we’ll get into that in a bit), Xenon flash, HTML web browser, A-GPS and nifty photo functions such as smile and face detection along with geo-tagging capabilities.

The feel of the handset is actually great. It’s a combination of metal, soft-touch-finished paint and plastic which all blend together marvelously. The physical design works extremely well as far as not cramping your style no matter how you’re using the phone — web browsing, taking photos, texting — plus, there’s not too much you can do to hide an 8 megapixel sensor.

TouchWiz is a decent attempt at jazzing up a rather poor, old, and horrible operating system that Samsung has made us deal with. You’re given a list of widgets that can be dropped on the home screen for your enjoyment, but we really found this to be a pain in the ass. The home screen offers basically no functionality besides showing the clock and the weather. Everything else is a just a shortcut to another application. If Samsung had copied a little bit of HTC’s TouchFLO 3D, they would have made this at least a little bit more interesting.

Diving into the handset’s OS, you sort of get a dull feeling. Nothing pops out at you and nothing is really interesting. In a world of smartphone operating system battles, even featurephones nowadays need to start stepping it up. Text-based menus really aren’t going to cut it, you know? Like, at least try a little bit for us, ok? The photo section of the phone is probably the most manicured part of the handset, but even that really isn’t saying much. Sure you can swipe to peruse your photos from last night’s drunken stupor, and yes, you can automagically (credit: Gizmodo) upload your pictures to Flickr and T-Mobile MyAlbum service, but we just don’t see the connection here. You know, between a phone and a camera. Especially with an OS so bad and so 1999, it just doesn’t work in our minds. If you really want a decent cameraphone on T-Mobile, we’d completely recommend picking up the Motorola ZN5 over this bad boy, it at least has a decent phone OS that you can work with. The resistive touch screen tech mixed with a pretty bad excuse for an operating system boiled with an 8 megapixel sensor baked with text menus aren’t exactly our cup of tea.

Then there’s also the price-point. For $249.99 on a 2-year agreement, we’d have trouble not slapping you if you didn’t pick up the BlackBerry Curve 8900 over this. Didn’t you hear? T-Mobile can’t keep them on the shelves. We highly doubt stockrooms won’t be cozying up the Samsung Memoir, though. It’s not horrible, it just isn’t worth the hassle or the price. At least in our photo scrapbook.

Click on over to our T-Mobile Samsung Memoir gallery!

Eastman Kodak announced on Tuesday that it has filed complaints alleging patent infringement against LG and Samsung in both the United States District Court for the Western District of New York and the US International Trade Commission. The disputed patents involve technology related to image capture, compression and data storage and a method for previewing motion images. The complainant asks for compensation for damages resulting from the alleged infringement, though the the amount of damages was not disclosed. Kodak also seeks injunctions to prohibit Samsung and LG from subsequent importation and sale of products, believed to be the Samsung Blackjack II and the LG Dare, cited in the complaints. Both Samsung and LG will fight the patent infringement allegations with LG’s spokesman Choi Jun-hyuk saying, “Our digital-camera technology is different from the one used by Kodak. We haven’t infringed upon Kodak’s related patents.” That makes it pretty clear LG is not going to lay down, roll over and hand Kodak a big wad of cash. It looks like we have another Battle Royale brewing over emerging technologies, though this time it’s not CDMA chip sets but diminutive camera phones that are caught in the legal cross hairs. We will have to keep our eye on this to see if it is just a bunch of posturing by big companies in order to negotiate a settlement and sign licensing agreements, or if these filings will indeed trickle down and have an effect on consumer camera phone availability.

[Via CNN Money]

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Watch out there Nokia, it looks like LG has its sights set on that high-end camera phone crown. While Nokia’s upcoming N96 is still stuck in 2007 with a 5 megapixel camera, companies like LG and Samsung are already turning up the heat. The mother load has still got to be the sexy KC910 but feast your eyes on what will be LG’s second 8 megapixel shooter, the KC780. Little is known about this peculiar looking two-tone slider but it was just dug out of an FCC document so we should be learning plenty more soon enough. Here are a few specs from the FCC files:

• Quadband GSM, GPRS/EDGE connectivity
• 8 megapixel camera with autofocus, red eye reduction,  face recognition and 30fps video recording
• 140 MB of internal memory
• microSD memory card slot
• Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0

We can’t say we’re big fans of the fact that no 3G is mentioned but odds are even if it did, it wouldn’t be US-friendly anyway. More to come – as soon as we know, you’ll know.

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Casio can hardly be considered a “leader” when it comes to cell phones, especially on this side of the world. When it comes to pocketable digital cameras however, Casio can run with the best of them. So what happens when Casio’s Exilim brand pops up on a sexy 8 megapixel mobile phone? Maybe nothing on this side of the world but hey, we can dream right? The Casio Exilim W63CA far and away looks like the slimmest 8 megapixel shooter we’ve seen to date and likely incorporates the new Omnivision sensor hailed by Casio as game-changing. In terms of known specs, the FCC didn’t let too much out of the bag. We can see the slim clam shell form factor, 3G, a swiveling 800 x 480 pixel display and the 8 megapixel camera of course. Beyond that there isn’t much to tell at this point. Normally that would be more than enough to get some adrenaline pumping but this is almost certainly a handset that will only make its way to US shores by way of tourism and the odd importer. As such, it’s hard to get overly excited about it on this side of the globe. Our Japanese readers should expect a formal announcement from KDDI soon.

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