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The Olympics are a time for athletes to shine. It is also a time for sponsors to promote their wares.

One company that is taking full advantage of its role as Olympic sponsor is Samsung. First, the electronics company unveiled three limited-edition gold colored mobile phones in honor of the 2004 summers games (see Sports Fans Win Gold with Mobile Apps), and now it is promoting its generosity in giving 13,000 VIPs and officials one of its newest smartphones, the SGH-i530.

To take full advantage of the Palm-based SGH-i530, Samsung developed a wireless application to help Olympic attendees track all the athletic events at the games.

Here's what we know about the SGH-i530: It is an update to an earlier model, the SGH-i500, which never made it into consumers' hands because no mobile operators picked it up.

The SGH-i530 is a dual-band GSM/GPRS (900/1800) smartphone that is not EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Evolution) compatible. EDGE is speedier version of GSM that goes has high as 384 Kbps.

As with most smartphones, it delivers Web access via a browser and WAP. You can also send and receive SMS, MMS and e-mail messages, as well as listen to MP3 audio and watch MPEG-4 video.

The smartphone is based on Palm OS Garnet 5.2. It 32MB of RAM and a Secure Digital slot for memory expansion, as well as a 324 x 352 pixel resolution touchscreen display that supports 65,536 colors.

In addition, there is a secondary OLED display on the back of the top half of the clamshell smartphone that supports 96 x 128 pixels for phone, time, and date information. The processor speed of the device is still unknown and it will not be Bluetooth enabled—so can't use wireless headsets with it out of the box. It has a one-megapixel digital camera.

The smartphone, which measures 3.5 x 2.2 x 1.1 inches and weighs 5.1 ounces, bundles two batteries and two styli.

Pricing and availability for the SGH-i530 are not known not at this time.