Phones: Samsung GT-S5600v Mobile Phone – Review

Thanks to Apple, touchscreens are all the rage on mobile phones; even so, they’re still uncommon in models that cost less than $400. At $399, Samsung’s GT-S5600v just sneaks into that price bracket, and for your money you get quite a lot else besides a trendy interface.

The 2.8-inch touchscreen takes a bit of getting used to. In particular, it’s easy to activate a function by mistake when you’re simply trying to scroll through options. It’s nevertheless responsive enough, though don’t expect the multitouch capabilities of a phone higher up the food chain. There’s no QWERTY keyboard, either, but a standard keypad does the job well enough, the virtual buttons suitably arrayed to make keying errors largely the fault of the user, rather than the phone.

A nice feature is the ‘gesture unlock’, which enables you to unlock the phone or speed dial a number by drawing a letter on the screen, though in that context it’s surprising the S5600v doesn’t recognise handwritten text. Anyone wishing to make notes can use the voice recorder instead.

An onboard music player accepts a decent range of codecs and you’re able to select your music files as ringtones. Native storage is a rather meagre 40MB – a dozen or so songs – but can be expanded up to an iPod nano-like 8GB via microSD card.

In fact the S5600V is well set up for multimedia use. Among many other facilities, there’s video recording, while a 3.2 megapixel still camera offers a small flash (though digital zoom only) and a nifty auto panorama stitch function. The results aren’t fabulous but they’ll do in a Facebook emergency.

Speaking of which, there are widgets for Facebook, YouTube, Flikr, Gmail and Google Maps, among others. The sites are a little awkward to use and view on the small screen, but they download quickly (and, we imagine, expensively) via Vodafone’s 3G network.

Altogether, then, it’s a well-featured phone that doesn’t break the bank.

Yet it’s not quite the finished article, and a number of things betray the S5600v, even when making allowances for its competitive price. Not least of these is the supplied data management software.

Installation of Samsung’s PC Studio program (Windows only – sorry Mac fans) from a disc took just shy of 12 minutes, before automatically checking online for updates. That’s an unusual length of time these days for this sort of program, and indicates either immense sophistication or immense software bloat. It turned out not to be the former – PC Studio is rudimentary at best. Moreover, it’s very slow to transfer data from computer to phone; it took so long to move music from one to the other that we checked to make sure we didn’t have the cable plugged into a USB 1.0 connection by mistake.

Other annoyances were minor but indicated a lack of attention to detail. There’s a currency converter, for example, but it doesn’t include New Zealand dollars. Samsung also included in the box a set of earphones that use a 3.5mm minijack connector. Except the phone’s only physical connection point is via a proprietary USB; there’s nowhere to plug in a 3.5mm minijack, so you have to attach the supplied adapter, adding another link in the chain of degraded audio quality. Non-readers of Tone (and we’ve been told such people do exist) will probably care less about this than we do. Damn us and our audiophile ways.

RICHARD BETTS

Samsung GT-S5600v – Tech Specs

DISPLAY: 2.8-inch touchscreen
CONNECTIVITY: USB (non-standard), Bluetooth, 3G
MEMORY: 40MB onboard, up to 8GB via microSD card
GSM BAND: Quad (850/900/1800/1900)
HSPDA: 7.2Mbit/s
CAMERA: 3.2MP, with flash
BATTERY: Lithium-ion rechargeable, 3G talk time 200 mins, 3G standby 12 days
DIMENSIONS: 54.8 x 102.8 x 12.9mm (W/H/D)
WEIGHT: 92g

PROS

• Well featured
• Competitively priced

CONS

• Weak software
• Let down by the small details

VERDICT

A good phone but lacking that last bit of polish

CONTACT

www.samsung.co.nz

This article is from Tone 82. Click here to check it out.