A design and innovation award was presented to the good people at Samsung Electronics at CES 2009 for the creation of the Samsung i627 smartphone. The overall styling is in line with the BlackJack and BlackJack II that we’ve already seen from Samsung, but there is one distinctive difference.

Instead of taking on a conventional BlackBerry-esque candybar smartphone shape, the Samsung i627 has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. This way, you can have an overall footprint that is a little smaller and, thus, easier to fit into a pocket. The QWERTY keyboard can then slide out of the bottom when it comes time to dial, send a text message, or anything like that.

From what I can gather, this does not have a touchscreen display, so you will need to rely mostly on the keyboard any time you want to get something done. Contrast with the recently announced Palm Pre smartphone that has a similar vertically slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Powered by Windows Mobile 6.1, the Samsung i627 gets an optical mouse, aGPS, a 3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth connectivity, and high-speed data by way of 3G.