Samsung Galaxy S Hoppin Edition Gives You Smartphone And Set-Top Box Simultaneously

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If there’s one thing I love when it comes to gadget news, it’s gadgets that serve more than one purpose simultaneously. I love it when gadgets do a variety of different things, and that’s why I’m loving the Samsung Galaxy S Hoppin edition, a phone that not only makes calls, but lets you download and watch movies…on your television.

The Hoppin, which seems to be available only in South Korea right now, looks like a fairly normal smartphone on the surface: it’s packing a four inch Super AMOLED screen, a one gig processor, Android 2.2, GPS, wi-fi and Bluetooth, 3.5 mm headset jack and a five megapixel camera, according to reports. But where the Hoppin actually distinguishes itself is with the addition of a dock that lets you hook the phone into your television, and use the phone as a set-top box equipped with the Hoppin entertainment service, which in turn gives you access to pay per view movies.  Prices are set to range from anywhere from 1000 to 3500 won (89 cents to $3.12 US, which is just fine by my count), and availability, according to some reports, says that you’ll be able to pick from 3500 titles (movies, TV shows and music videos all fall under “titles”) with access nearly tripling to 10000 in the period known as “later”.

I don’t know about you, but I like that idea just fine, especially if the 3G / 4G concept gets sufficiently useful enough to handle movie streaming from, say, Netflix. Plugging my phone into my television and playing all the videos I want from Netflix for one cost…well…that’s definitely good enough by me. I’ve seen iPod docks before, letting you expand your iPod into a stereo system with vastly better speakers, but I can’t remember ever seeing a dock usable for video transmission, and that would be pretty sweet.