It's a Phone...No, A Camera...Wait, I Mean a TV...And it Plays Music

A slew of 3 megapixel camera phones are being introduced overseas as camera phone image quality slowly but surely catches up to that of stand-alone digital still cameras. The latest one has everything but the kitchen sink. Check out the antenna:

Pantech & Curitel releases PH-S5000V and PH-K1000V, 3.1-megapixel camera phones equipped with an external TV receiver and a mechanical shutter. The two models adopt the company’s world first 3-mega CMOS camera module and receive TV and FM radio signals, the company added.

Users can also download up to 20 music files from their computers by using the built-in MP3 player. The camcorder allows up to 160 minute continuous recording of moving images.

This is in addition to two other 3 megapixel camera phones that were introduced this month: the Samsung SPH-S2300 and the Lucky Goldstar SD350/3500, both of which use CCD instead of CMOS imagers.

These will take time to reach stateside due to our older, slower wireless system, which takes a lot longer to transmit a 3 meg picture than the systems in Korea and Japan.