Samsung has announced the sequel to its very popular Star range, the touchscreen feature phones, the Star III and Star III Duos, which are touted to bring social networking experiences to feature phones along with an affordable price. Samsung has also included  ChatON – Samsung’s free messaging platform, which is surely a welcome addition on a feature phone.

The Samsung Star III comes with a 3-inch capacitive QVGA LCD display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, which can record QCIF videos, the TouchWiz Lite user interface and 20MB of internal memory extendible via a microSD card slot accepting cards of up to 16GB. In terms of connectivity, you get EDGE speeds, Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 and you also have stereo FM radio with RDS and a music player with SoundAlive.The battery is 1,000mAh. If you look at the hardware, there’s nothing notable apart from ChatON service included to differentiate from the last Star II. Even from the design, its almost identical to the last-gen Star except for the slightly thinner and wider looks.

As you’ve probably guessed already the Samsung Star III Dous is identical to the Star but for the dual-sim functionality which is quite popular in emerging markets.

The two devices will be launched in Russia first by the end of this month and will subsequently be shipped to other regions such as CIS, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Southeast/Southwest Asia.