In the rapidly-expanding cameraphone market, Samsung have steadily positioned themselves as one of the big boys alongside Nokia & Sony Ericsson, with Motorola seemingly falling by the wayside. The key releases of the G600 & G800 as well as the slightly-older D900 have all proved this point and rapidly put Samsung in a very-healthy position which they seem intent on capitalising on.

The F490 is another one to be added to that list thanks to its 5 megapixel camera, but it is certainly much more than just a device for snapshots. As it is based on the already-released F700, its appeal should extend further than the cameraphone market, and more into the market of those looking for a possible alternative to the Apple iPhone.

On the surface the F490 appears to be a mildly tweaked version of the F700 but this would be slightly unfair. Yes it does still have the same 3.2” display and HSDPA capabilities, but the improvements made do seem to be targeting the iPhone deliberately with crosshairs. The most immediate change is the removal of the slide-out QWERTY keypad, making the F490 a full touchscreen device. There are still a couple of touch-sensitive soft keys located underneath the display for calls, but aside from that the front is as bare as the F700.

The size of the F490 has been amended when compared with the F700 as it is slightly taller but the width has been reduced along with the thickness which has been condensed to 11.8MM.

During the F700's development it seemed that the camera module used by Samsung would be 5MP, but this was strangely downgraded late on in development to 3MP, much to many peoples surprise (myself included.) The camera on F490 will be 5MP but strangely without autofocus, which makes it the first of the 5 Mega Pixel camera phones to be without this feature which ideally will keep the price down, but you have to wonder, can a good cameraphone work sufficiently without autofocus.

The most interesting aspect of the F490 will be the Croix User Interface which although was implemented poorly in the P520 Armani still showed signs of promise. If this is used in the correct way with a sufficient processor in the F490, they may be onto a winner here.

A welcome (though not necessarily required) improvement is to the internal memory capacity, which has gone up from 100MB in the F700 to 130MB in the F490. Micro SD support will also be present allowing up to 2GB cards to be used, although we hope that Samsung confirm support for HCSD cards up to 8GB at some point before launch.

The F490 is shaping up to be an interesting addition to Samsung's feature phone line-up, as the improvements made may be small in number they aren't small in stature. The 5MP camera will almost certainly be a major selling point as will the entirely touch-based interaction.