Samsung officially confirmed today the style-driven Soul b, a fashionable handset that broadens the Samsung Ultra lineup. The Soul b stands for Spirit Of Ultra in bar form factor. It clearly resembles the Samsung Soul traits, as the keyboard layout, shape and all-metal styling. The phone was previously rumored as Samsung U800, yet a sample pre-release unit we received reveals another name - Samsung U200, so the exact model designation still remains unclear.

Samsung Soul b is a feature-loaded brushed metal phone. Its minimalistic design, mere 9.9mm thickness and 88.7g rank the phone among the most compact phones, being a tad better than Nokia 6500 classic. Other features that put the Soul b in direct head-on collision course with the Nokia 6500 classic are the 1GB built-in memory, and the bright 2" 16M TFT display with 240 x 320 pixels resolution.

Official photos of Samsung Soul b

Samsung Soul b comes with the customizable graphic user interface, found for the first time in the Samsung Soul. Users are allowed to create their own skins with the on-handset User Created Skin setup. Additionally, display skins are customizable with fonts, colors and background images.

Samsung Soul b is recognizable for its 3-megapixel camera with powerful LED flash, which however has rather flimsy video recording capabilities - QCIF resolution at 15fps. The multimedia set includes FM radio with RDS, MP3/WAV/WMA player and Video player/editor. Other useful applications are the Office document viewer/editor and full HTML browser.

Along with the tri-band GSM support, Samsung Soul b features HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), as well as Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP. The 1GB built-in memory, is expandable via microSD slot - something the Nokia 6500 classic lacks.

Samsung Soul b will be available in five colors: Soul Grey, Platinum Silver, Metallic Black, Soul Pink and Amethyst Violet. It will first become available in Germany early June and then will be released consequently in other countries and regions, including Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia (China), Southwest Asia, Southeast Asia, and South America. The price of Soul b is still unknown.

Now that it's officially announced, we can present you our set of photos of Samsung Soul b, together with a 360-degree spin of the phone. We recently managed to get our hands on a pre-release the Samsung Soul b.