Do you recall the Symbian powered Samsung Innov8 camera phone?

From the back, the Samsung i8510 Innov8 looked just like a stand-alone camera. Launched in early September of 2008, the Innov8's claim to fame was the 8MP camera on back. There was a Dual LED flash, AutoFocus and HDR. A front-facing VGA camera was available for video calls. The first Android handset, the T-Mobile G1, was still more than a month away. The Apple iPhone 3G was only two-months old when the handset launched. The Samsung Innov8 was not a touchscreen phone, and relied on a slide out numeric keyboard for input.

The Innov8 carried a 2.8-inch display with a resolution of 240 x 320. That worked out to a pixel density of 143ppi. Without a touchscreen, an optical mouse was employed. Under the hood was the TI-OMAP 2430 chip with a single-core 330MHz CPU. 16GB of native storage was inside and the whole shebang was powered by a 1200mAh battery. The Symbian S60 3rd edition was pre-installed. The 8MP camera was a big deal at the time.

The Samsung Innov8 came prepared for video. It had support for DivX playback out of the box and was equipped with Surround Sound stereo speakers. Out of a scale of 1 to 10, we gave the phone a "9" in our review, which you can read by clicking on this link.

Samsung would try the form factor again in 2012, with the Samsung Galaxy Camera. Powered by Android this time, the lone rear-facing camera had a 16.3MP sensor, 21x optical zoom, and a Xenon Flash.