With the Olympics here, we look back at all the officially-branded Samsung phones that’ve been released through the years.
The Tokyo Olympic Games is finally here, a year after it was expected (and after a busy summer of sporting events, depending on where you live). If you’re a fan of Android handsets or Samsung smartphones, we’ve got something for you, because the celebration of top-tier athletic prowess doesn’t just affect the sporting world. Since 2000 – coincidentally the same year mobile phone throwing was created as a sport – Samsung officially started sponsoring the Olympic games, and as a result, started to release phones with the five-ring branding emblazoned on them. Samsung phones have changed a lot over the past 20 years (well,21, but with the Tokyo Olympics technically a 2020 event, and 20 being a nice round number, we’re sticking with that). Smartphones were only willed into existence relatively recently, and lots of the older Samsung Olympic phones are real blasts from the past. So to reminisce on two decades of sports and smartphones, we’ve dug up all the old Olympic-themed phones, both feature and smart, to take you on a trip down memory lane. Just to be clear, Winter Olympics versions aren’t listed here – look forward to that article in early 2022. The 1999-released Samsung SGH-600 feature phone belongs in a museum, but to commemorate the Sydney Olympics, Samsung put out a version with a little Olympic logo on the flip-down shell. This phone had a 65-hour battery life, a 96 x 32 resolution screen and all your basic feature phone functions. The keys were hidden by a flip-down shell, in the way some early feature phones were wont to do. While Samsung states three million SGH-600 units were sold, it’s not clear how many Olympic-themed versions were made. It seems, though, that the handset was made to add prestige to Samsung’s name, more than to sell special versions of the device. Flipping forward four years (you can see what we did there), the Greek Olympics in 2004 had the SGH-i530 as the sponsored phone.
