For years, we poor, neglected Americans have had to sit on the sidelines with our old-and-busted cell phones while Japanese and Korean gadget enthusiasts always got access the new hotness. It has always seemed like the coolest and wildest phones were not available here.

Now, however, Samsung is throwing us a fricken bone. The company said this week that it planned to offer for sale in the U.S. its "dual QWERTY phone" poetically named the SGH-D307.

The clamshell phone opens either like an old-school Motorola or like a laptop. The keyboard is used either like a cell phone keypad or a laptop keyboard depending on which way you open it. Cool!

The phone features IM support (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo IM), high-speed data transfer and Bluetooth. It also features voice recognition and a speaker phone.

This is exactly the kind of phone that never made it to these shores. Thanks, Samsung! What's next?

(via Textually.org)