Samsung Electronics has developed a mobile phone that automatically converts speech into text. Rather than rely on cramming words in tiny fonts onto a small screen, users can just dictate.

Samsung's new technology - VoiceMode - is incorporated in the new Samsung p207 phone, which will initially be shipped to the US.

At the CES Show in Las Vegas this week, Samsung also showcased a camera phone that can recognise text on a business card. Just make a picture of the business card and with the help of some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text is automatically inserted in the phone's address book.

Samsung announced 25 to 30 new phones to be introduced later this year, including the world's first QVGA phone that allows consumers to record up to one hour of high quality video directly on their phone; the US's first multi-mega pixel camera phone line up, including a two mega pixel and a five mega pixel camera with 3X optical zoom capabilities and the US's first line-up of phones to operate on the next-generation high-speed wireless networks known as EVDO, allowing consumers to send and receive pictures, video and data at speeds comparable to cable modem or DSL connectivity.

Also in the pipeline are video-on-demand (VOD) devices that allow consumers to wirelessly stream videos onto the handset from the network or download and store the videos on the handset for convenient playback; and music-on-demand (MOD) devices that give consumers instant access to digital music, allowing them to download or stream popular tunes directly to their handset. Details on these phones were not given.

From The Inquirer