The Samsung M8910 Pixon 12 is a 12 megapixel touchscreen phone that is due to hit Europe in June, followed by other regions in August. Coming just days after rivals Sony Ericsson announced the 12 megapixel Satio, the Pixon 12 is notable because it will beat the Satio to market, and will probably be the first 12 megapixel camera phone on general worldwide release.

It also includes a 28mm wide-angle lens and Xenon flash. As well as stills, the M8910 shoots 720x480-pixel video at 30 frames per second. Which all sounds great, but we'll wait until we've had a hands-on and seen some test shots before we get really excited -- after all, there's still the matter of that tiny little phone-sized image sensor.

With HSPA and built-in Wi-Fi, you'll get instant upload to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and the like. According to today's reports, it'll pack quad-band GSM/EDGE, dual-band UMTS/HSPA, Bluetooth and GPS.

Closely resembling last year's M8800 Pixon, the most obvious improvement is in the camera area. The 12 megapixel camera aims to be every bit as good as a dedicated digital camera. Samsung have concentrated on giving the Pixon 12 a high-quality lens to ensure optimum image quality, there's also a Xenon flash and the M8910 has an intelligent autofocus system where the user can select the focal point of the picture by touching an object on the screen. Samsung say that the Pixon 12 is fast too, and users can move from shot to shot in about 2 seconds. This handset can also automatically adjust to different background and lighting conditions, and Samsung camera phones usually come with a load of other goodies too.

A weak point with many Samsung camera phones is the video capture quality. Samsung haven't said what the resolution is on the Pixon 12, but on the old Pixon it was 720 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second, which is certainly good enough for fullscreen playback or uploading to YouTube.

There's a 3.1" AMOLED display, although Samsung have not said what resolution it is. It is either a 240 x 400 pixel panel, or a 480 x 800 pixel panel.. and our guess is that it is the latter.

There aren't many other details available at present, except that this is a 3.5G device with both HSDPA and HSUPA high-speed data support plus WiFi. Does it have GPS?  Well, the old Pixon does so expect to see it here too. Is it a smartphone? No, this is an "M" series handset running the TouchWiz interface. As for size, weight and price.. well, hopefully Samsung will come out with some more details in the next few days.