There is an interesting battle emerging in the convergence arena. Yes, it's that buzz word most of us have come to hate since 'convergence' usually means jack of all trades, master of none.

Mobile phones trying to become mp3 players/low resolution cameras have been around for a while now. The iPhone will add basic phone and camera functions to its pedigree in music playback to woo us and the final contender is the digital camera trying to do some of the same – act as decent music and video player (ok, so no phone functions… yet).

Samsung announced today it hopes to have 20 per cent of the UK camera market by 2009.

To do that it's gone wild trying to release as many new products as possible. In addition to the seven cameras it announced at the beginning of January it has since added the S1030, a cheaper 10megapixel camera than the S1050, the L74 Wide, which has a 28mm wide-angle lens for wide pics and the 10megapixel NV11.

Perhaps the most intriguing digital camera is the L77, which is one of the first true convergence products from the digital camera space. Depending on how you flip the screen it will act as a movie player, mp3 player or digital camera.

The movie mode is very average and has a mangled aspect ratio. The mp3 player is fine, except you have to use a 2.5mm headphone jack which, as any PDA owner will know, is about as useful as public transport on a snowy day in London.

It also features Samsung's new Tour Guide software that is a kind of mini-travel encyclopaedia for its digital cameras. The software currently indexes 2,600 cities across the world with travel, sight-seeing and historical information as well as a few pictures of major landmarks.

I think this is a good idea for travellers who run about snapping up their vacations but the software crashed when we tried it and a Samsung official subsequently whisked the device away.

Considering you can download pretty much all of Wikipedia minus images in a 1.4GB file, ideal for PDAs, it seems bizarre that Samsung is trying to start from scratch.

Here's a quick clip of the software (working):

Click To Play