I went to Pricegrabber.com and celluloco.com and the SGH I500 is being sold on both sites. I find it hard to believe and am extremely skeptical. On pricegrabber, it is an individual and he shows pictures of the SGH I500 and gives specs and it is definately the right phone. He says he has 5 and will only sell them all at one time??? Anyway, the celluloco person says he has 6 and will only sell all 6 at one time??? Anyway, I dont see how this can be when the phone is not released to anyone anywhere that anyone knows of and they are still arguing over whether it will be the i500 or i530.. Rave, know anything about this??

Thanks...

I don't see how this is possible. Of course there are some pre-production sets for testing and marketing samples exist, but none have ever been offered in stores yet. Pictured is a very early version of the (now) SGH-i530. As for his saying that he's seen stores in UK already carrying them, well perhaps he's got that confused with the SGH-s500 which is a non-Palm OS feature phone.

If this offer is legit (minus his statement that they are already in store), I would still not recommend anyone take up on this offer. If those sets are preproduction samples, then they really aren't ready for consumers, such as poor RF tuning, higher battery comsumption, general instability and such.

Update after a closer look:

This same person also states that he's got SGH-d700s, our Symbian phones in development, which have not been released yet, either. In his SGH-i500 post, he refers to the photo of SGH-i500 'in his hand in the photo' but obviously the picture is from an exhibit, you can see the grey cable below the black power cable, which is an anchoring cable user to lockdown samples during exhibits so they won't get lost. Hope people don't get taken by that 'seller'...

I thought it seemed odd. Of course i lied about having a close friend n a fairly high position at Samsung. Did you see his reply that he might be in a higher position? LOL. I thought that was funny since he didnt mention his position. Anyway, i was wondering about the cable on the phone. It would seem that if he took pictures of him holding the phone it would show more or at least be charged? Mobilecity.com says the phone is coming out for $699.00 on Feb 24th, 2004 but that could be another one of those things where when the date gets here, it turns into another month of a countdown(i.e Just-Talk). Looks like a great pdaphone though. Thanks for the info. If you find out anything else from work, please let me know. Thanks....