Samsung Drops VoIP LCD In Korea, the Rest of Us Soon?

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Yep, you read the headline, right–Samsung is bringing Voice over IP to a 22 inch LCD display in the form of the 220TN. The situation is all too common in today’s global village/planet Earth. Your kids study abroad or you’ve got family/friends on the other side of the country or maybe a long distance love affair and you want to do more than just talk on the phone a lot. Sure, voice communication is fine, but picture would be best. So, where is your video phone? Well, if you live in Korea, it’s at your local electronics shop. The Samsung 220TN is an LCD with a low-end PC built in. It also comes with a webcam right where you’d expect to find one on a laptop–just above center-screen. From the pictures, it even looks like it can tilt up and down, so you don’t have to get off the couch to video-conference.

The low-end PC is perfect for the VoIP functions. It comes embedded with Windows XP and runs an as yet unnamed VoIP software application, though the scuttlebutt is that it definitely won’t be Skype compatible. However, one wonders that if it’s Windows XP, couldn’t the user just download the app themselves? Regardless, the Samsung 220TN will still let you make video calls, which is really bringing the future of communications right into the present. And how long have we been waiting for those two-way video screens like on Star Trek?

A quick glance at the features list provided on Samsung’s press release for the 220TN LCD (and it’s sister display the 225UW) at IFA 2007 this year tells us that both the PC-side and the display-side of this box are more than adequate. The PC-side of the 220TN includes a 2 megapixel camera, mic and speaker, Windows XP, a Geode LX800 500 Mhz processor, a built-in 1GB flash drive (for downloading Skype to, maybe?) 256MB of RAM and a standard Ethernet port. The display side comes with 1680×1050 resolution, 16.7 million colors, and 300cd/m² brightness. No word on when this will hit the rest of the Western World.

Source: AkihabaraNews



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