October 11, 2011 - 12:05 AMT
Samsung reveals business smarphone Stratosphere 4G

Samsung revealed a 4G LTE Samsung Stratosphere smarphone with American mobile operator Verizon. It is a smarphone with QWERTY keyboard.

According to Gadget Lab, the Stratosphere targets the business professional crowd, the folks who used to use (or still use) BlackBerries, but are looking to make the transition to Android or iOS.

The Stratosphere features a 4-inch Super AMOLED display with a 5-row QWERTY keyboard underneath. It runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) on a 1 GHz Hummingbird processor. For the biz folk, the smartphone supports some B2B services like Microsoft Exchange Active Sync as well as VPN, mobile device management and encryption.

The Stratosphere includes a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera, 5-megapixel rear facing camera and hot spotting for up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

As far as Android goes, the operating system has had a stellar year so far. The OS dominates the smartphone market, and devices like the Samsung Galaxy S II are hitting record sales numbers.

The Samsung Stratosphere will be available October 13 for $150 with a two-year contract at Verizon.