Samsung celebrates 'emotional design' phone

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

7th June 2007 10:19 GMT

Samsung has turned to one of the world's leading - apparently - industrial designers to remould its latest handset as a "pragmatic work of art" rather than a run-of-the-mill candybar.

The designer is Jasper Morrison, the phone is the SGH-E590. No, we hadn't heard of Morrison either, but the UK's Design Museum describes the London-born product stylist as "one of today's most influential industrial designers... renowned for his ascetically elegant, quietly humorous style". He's worked on "everything from a tray-table to a tram system".

Samsung SGH-E590
Samsung's E590: styled by Jasper Morrison

Actually, we quite like the E590, which in its "noble black" form has a rather nice-looking black and white minimalism. Under the classy casing is a tri-band GSM/GPRS/Edge and Bluetooth 2.0 radios; and 90MB of memory. The design incorporates a 1.8in, 220 x 220, 262,144-colour display and a three-megapixel auto-focus camera.

Incidentally, the object holding the camera in the right of our picture is the "Bean Bag", described by Samsung as a "unique tripod which is a truly useful and portable accessory made of a special rubberized material for maximum flexibility and grip". It comes bundled with the phone, which goes on sale in Europe later this month.