Samsung’s first Armani phone was the P520, the – at the time – highly impressive touchscreen device featuring their unique ‘Criox’ user interface.  One year later, Samsung chose the Emporio Armani branding for the M7500 Night Effect, so called thanks to its array of flashing lights and now, another year on, Samsung have returned to Giorgio for their latest collaboration and first smartphone together, the B7620.

At first glance the touchscreen slider says ‘N97 Mini’, but not so in the specification, with the Armani, dare we say it, striking the first blow against its rival.  For starters, the B7620 uses the latest version of Windows Mobile, 6.5, but it’s the 3.5″ AMOLED touchscreen which really pulls us in, as the Samsung AMOLED looks so fantastic on the Omnia II.

The black and bronze coloured casing contains a wealth of other features too, including a 5 megapixel camera, 3G with HSDPA, Assisted GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 8GB internal memory with a MicroSD card slot for expansion to 32GB, a DivX-certified media player and of course, a two-stage, tilting, slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

From the pictures Samsung have published at this point, the B7620 is subtly branded, a welcome change from the decidedly unsubtle M7500, however it is a weighty beast, tipping the scales at a 164 grams, which in the smartphone world is certainly not catwalk material. The sturdy frame hides a powerful ARM 800Mhz processor, although teamed with a slightly lowly 192MB of RAM, but we imagine the B7620 should zip along nicely.

We should be seeing the new B7620 hit the stores sometime during October according to Armani, and we have a feeling this will be the most successful Armani/Samsung crossover yet.