We’ve had the Samsung P520 Armani featured for quite a while now in our pre-release section and the internet is rife with rumours regarding the model. Some rumours pitch this as an ill-founded attempt to beat the iPhone at its own game; however with the release of the Samsung F700 and the rebranding of the P520 as the P520 Armani, it is clear that Samsung are going for a different target, namely the LG Prada.

This is no real surprise, as LG and Samsung have a long history of bringing out nearly identical products (Samsung P400 and LG 7100 anyone?), but the trend had recently died down with LG veering off in another direction and out of direct competition with Samsung. By releasing innovative phone such as the Chocolate, the Shine and most recently the Prada LG have taken a considerable slice of the market, where (with the certain exception of a couple of Nokia models) Samsung used to reign supreme, i.e. the fashion phone sector.

Originally of course, a fashion phone was simply form over functionality (features back in the day being relatively basic anyway), so all a phone needed to qualify was to look the part, no designer names were needed. With the market pretty much at saturation point now though and with overall expectations higher, cashing in on the success of big names became a good idea.

The Samsung P520 Armani manages to tick all of the right boxes for this market though. It looks very slinky (especially since it rebranding see before and after pics) and being based on the old p300/310 it’s tiny. This new unit is touch screen only, so it no longer resembles a pocket calculator, like its predecessors, a big improvement.

A unit this size is never going to have ground breaking features, so no 3G capability, but I doubt this will be an issue for most people that want a phone like this, after all that isn’t the point of a designer phone. So saying the spec sheet is quite impressive and puts the P520 Armani firmly in the upper-middle bracket of handset in that respect. It sports a 3.15 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, 50Mb on-board memory, Micro-SD card slot, Bluetooth 2.0, GPRS, tri-band, MP3, AAC and AAC+, TV out and FM radio.

Overall we are quite enthusiastic about this model and expect to see it out fairly soon. It’s not as some would believe a direct iPhone killer, but it certainly wins on the style front and I suspect it will push the Prada from its podium.