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We weren’t really expecting to hear anything until June 29, but we now have our first confirmed Galaxy S phone sighting and it’s been identified as the Samsung Captivate.
AT&T revealed on Thursday that it will offer the Captivate in the coming months, but it didn’t provide a specific date or pricing. This announcement follows Samsung’s worldwide launch of the Galaxy S i9000 and shows that the company isn’t limiting the Galaxy S to just one type of design.
As you can see from the photo, the Captivate has more of a hard-edged design than the i9000 has, but it still rocks a beautiful 4-inch Super AMOLED touch screen. Some of the benefits of Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology are that it allows for thinner displays, improved touch sensitivity, and better visibility in bright environments, which we saw when we checked out the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Wave. The Captivate also has a six-axis sensor, built-in accelerometer, a gyroscope, and has pinch-to-zoom support.
With such a beautiful screen and Samsung’s 1GHz Hummingbird application processor to keep things moving, it’s no surprise that multimedia will play a key role on the Captivate.
In addition to having a 5-megapixel camera with HD video recording, the phone has 16GB of onboard storage (expandable up to 32GB) and 3D surround sound. Samsung will preload the smartphone with its Media Hub that lets you access video and e-book content from “some of the biggest names in entertainment,” but it hasn’t disclosed details about content providers yet.
The Captivate will ship running Android 2.1 and features a new and improved version of TouchWiz interface that includes widgets for Samsung’s Social Hub feature where you can see your contacts’ latest updates (very similar to HTC’s Friend Stream) and favorite contacts. The main menu of applications is also spread out across several panels that you can swipe from side-to-side instead of vertically like current Android phones. Its other goodies include 3G support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and a full HTML Web browser.
Obviously, it’s a little premature to make any conclusions about the Samsung Captivate, but it certainly looks as if AT&T finally has a powerful Android smartphone. Of course, the Galaxy S is rumored to land at the three other major U.S. carriers as well; perhaps we’ll find out more on June 29?
