Samsung SGH-T819
May 20th, 2008
At 3.96 inches by 2.03 inches by 0.55 inch and 3.2 ounces, the SGH-T819 is about the same size as T-Mobile's earlier Samsung SGH-429. On the whole, it has a comfortable feel in the hand and a well-made topnotch construction; The convenient thumb grip is moving the slider up and down. The main display measures two inches and supports 262,000 colors. Like most screens of its class, it's relatively bright and offers a vibrant resolution. But on the flip side, it's also difficult to see in direct light. You can change the backlighting time, the brightness, and the dialing font type, size, and color. The menu interface, available in two styles, is standard Samsung, which means it is very easy to use. Discarding its flash-heavy menus of a couple years ago was a good decision on Samsung's part.
The navigation controls have a little different design from most Samsung handsets. Instead of the universal trapezoidal toggle, the SGH-T819 features a relatively small circular toggle with a central OK key. The two large controls on both sides of the toggle each serve a dual purpose. The top half of each button functions as a soft key, and the bottom half serves as the calling keys. You will also find a customizable shortcut control, a Web browser button and a dedicated clear button. On the whole, the navigation array is user-friendly. Although keypad buttons are big enough, they're completely flat.
Completing the exterior of the SGH-T819 are a volume rocker and a headset/charger jack on the left spine. Over on the right spine are a thin camera shortcut and the microSD card slot. The camera lens is positioned on the top rear of the phone next to a self-portrait mirror. You don't have to open the slider to use the camera.
The SGH-T819 has a 1,000-contact phone book with room in each entry for six phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, two URLs, a company name and title, a nickname, a birthday, and two street addresses (as you know, the SIM card holds an additional 250 names). You can organize contacts into group and you pair callers with a photo and one of 20 64-note polyphonic ringtones. Other basics include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, an alarm clock, a calendar, a task list, a notepad, a calculator, a world clock, PC syncing, a currency and unit converter, a timer, a stopwatch, a tip calculator, and instant messaging software for AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, and Windows Live. More advanced options include a speakerphone, voice dialing, and stereo Bluetooth.
The SGH-T819's 1.3-megapixel camera takes pictures in five resolutions, from 1,820x1,024 down to 240x180. Other camera features include five quality settings; brightness and white balance controls; a night mode; exposure meeting; 20 fun frames; a self-timer, and three color effects. There's also a digital zoom (though it's unusable at the highest resolution) and three shutter sounds, plus a silent option. The camcorder records clips in two resolutions (176x144 and 128x96) with sound and a number of editing options; clips meant for multimedia messages are capped at about 40 seconds, or you can shoot for as long as the available memory will permit. The SLM offers 30MB of shared internal memory. That's below average for a multimedia phone, so a microSD card is recommended.
The music player has a generic Samsung design, so don’t hope for too much. Though it's easy to use, the interface is simple, and the features are almost limited. You can personalize the SGH-T819 with a variety of wallpapers and background colors and you can compose your own greeting message. If you want more options, you can download the from T-Mobile's T-zones service using the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. The SGH-T819 has limited gaming options, unfortunately. It offers demo versions of just two titles: Platinum Sudoku and Lumiens Mobile.
Performance.
The SGH-T819 has an estimated battery life of 5 hours talk time and 12.5 days standby time. According to FCC radiation testing, the SGH-T819 has a digital SAR rating of 1.19 watts per kilogram. The SGH-T819 has a rated battery life of 5 hours talk time and 12.5 days standby time.
Samsung SGH-D900i
January 26th, 2008
From the front, the powerful slide-up showcases a large screen and comfortable keypad, but turn it to the side and the mobile reveals a profile that is amazingly slim. Using Samsung's innovative Smart Surface Mounting Technology (SSMT), this mobile is able to compress the most advanced features in the super slim form.
Capturing life's special moments is a snap with the embedded 3.13 Megapixel camera. Outfitted with auto focus, flash, 4x digital zoom, and a mirror for self-portraits, your pictures will always come out looking great. Further enabled by a timer, multi shot, and other photo effects, this mobile phone eliminates a need for a separate digital camera.
Preserve your memories for eternity with the Ultra Edition 12.9’s video camera. Recording in 352x288 recording resolution with voice, and at 30 frame rates per second, this camera is compatible with H.263 and MPEG4 video formats. Now you can easily keep your precious memories frozen in time.
A stunningly large 2.12" 262K QVGA display is the perfect medium for accessing the mobile's contents. Large enough for 13 lines of text, this display features text, photo, and video Caller ID.
With FM stereo radio, you can listen to countless hours of music, up-to-the minute news, weather, and traffic reports whenever you want, from wherever you are. Easily find the right station by using auto or manual tuning. Stay informed and entertained with Samsung's SGH-D900i.
Unleash the power of your mobile's features with upgradeable memory via microSD. The phone’s slim and compact size conceals a more than ample 60 MB of built-in memory in addition to the virtually unlimited capacity of the microSD slot.
An indispensable tool for business conferences or presentations, TV-Output enables the mobile's contents to be easily exhibited on any TV screen.
Samsung SGH-F500
January 8th, 2008
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Closely related to the Samsung F300, the Samsung F500 is a dual-face multimedia 3G phone with a "multimedia side" and "phone side". However, the SGH-F500 is much more than a standard music phone. This handset is designed to play videos and, optionally, receive digital TV broadcasts.
With this model you no longer need to convert your movies or video clips before sending them to the device or its memory card. The solution's versatility is its strength, for only very few people are fond of processing some files on PC so as to allow their mobile device to identify it. For instance, conversion of a movie into the iPhone's H.264 standard takes about 45-60 minutes. What is more, you are down to go over every clip separately, while the success rate is not always a hundred percent. Which makes you realize that this brings about many chores.
This is a 3G UMTS phone, with tri-band GSM support (900/1800/1900) plus GPRS and EDGE data. The Samsung F500's 3G capabilities allow the handset to download multimedia over a UMTS network. The F500 can be connected to a PC via a USB 2.0 connection. There's no WiFi though, which seems to be an annoying omission.
The handset is relatively slender at 116.5x50x10.7 mm, 107.5 grams. These figures don't include the external battery, doubling as a cover. I doubt that somebody will attempt to use the F500 without this cover on, which gives us the F500's final size: 15 mm thick, 120 mm tall and the weight roughly 140 grams. Pretty sizable dimensions, which break away from the market's average numbers for the current generation. On the other hand, the power consumption issue is dealt with this way, so there are some positives to this approach as well. The phone with the cover applied readily slips into a jacket's, shirt's or pants pocket, and it won't bulge out. You won't experience any discomfort with the F500 in your jeans either; however, the cover tends to pick up business cards, pieces of paper, etc.
The svelte profile of the casing has brought about some new solutions - the battery now is non-detachable, so the handset's left spine now houses RESET button to reboot the F500 if it happens to freeze up. Unlike the Samsung F300, where a number of malfunctions caused you to reset the device manually, the F500 seems to have defeated these issues. The left-hand side also features the volume rocker, charger/headset socket. Flipping over to the right spine, you can find the hold slider, which is really stiff - using it you can toggle between PMP and phone modes and lock the handset's controls.
The handset comes with two displays - let's start with its phone face. The screen here offers 220x176-pixel resolution (30x24 mm), measuring 1,5 inches from corner to corner and having 65 K colors (TFT). It passes the trial of direct sun light fairly easily, though it is not as good as the handsets with bigger displays. The F500's phone face can present you with up to 4 text and 3 service lines, which is a fair capacity, when thinking of the Samsung F300, where the display in its phone side could put up only two lines - apparently, this was too scanty.
The video display is here to make a statement with its huge 2,4-inch diagonal, 240x320-pixel resolution (48x36 mm), 12 text lines. However, reading text is not what this screen is meant for - its specialization are movies and images above all else. Unlike the F300, the standard features like SMS are handled by the phone part, which is the right move, so now there is a solid borderline, separating the two faces of the F500. This display is capable of 262 K colors and a pretty sharp picture (TFT). In the sun, the screen loses in contrast, but remains readable.
What about camera built in the F500, it is a standard CMOS-module with 2 Mpix resolution. The settings are nothing to shout about - three quality levels (Economy, Normal, Fine, Super Fine), picture size (1600x1200 pixels and a bunch of smaller resolutions). Among other available features are timers, night mode, mosaic, frames, multi-shot. Special effects include Gray, Negative, Sepia, Aqua, Green. Digital zoom x6 is also onboard. Video can be captured in 320x240-pixel resolution and at 15 FPS, recording format - mpeg4.
Cell phone comes with a 900 mAh Li-Pol battery, with the battery life rated for 3 hours of talk and 200 hours of standby. Full charging time - 2,5 hours. I don't think filed-testing of the battery life without the cover on, which carries another 900 mAh unit, makes any sense, so all the figures below were acquired with a fully kitted out device. If you would like to know how long the F500 can last without this extra battery, divide all the numbers by two.
The F500 is unique for its inbuilt memory architecture - the phone part sports 21 Mb, where you are free to store personal data like ringtones. But the video side of the F500 is where the flavor is - 400 Mb reserved for your music, video and other kinds of multimedia content. Both memory types can access microSD, what is more the phone has no quarrel with cards bigger than 4 Gb (the best the market can offer today). When the F500 was only in the works, the maker intended various editions of the handset carrying 1, 2 and 4 Gb onboard, but forwent this idea. Indeed, it so much easier to ship the handset with different memory cards in the box, rather than arrange logistics for different versions, given that the sales of junior variations will be nowhere near the line's top solutions. In this case the phone essence had the upper hand over PMP and MP3-players.
The music department has been adopted from the Samsung F300 Ultra Music along with support for mp3, AAC, OGG, AC3, WMA, and DRM 2.0 standard, MTP protocol, which allows you to get music onto the F500 via Windows Media Player. You can listen to music both via the pair of earphones coming packaged with the F500 - these are quite good in-ear headphones - or beam music onto a Bluetooth-headset. Music playback in the F500 is not something we feel like complaining about - with its high sound volume and relatively clear sound it is one of the market's best players.
And the main news is that now you will not have to worry about losing important docs or stored in your phone favourite photos! With Utrack, a notification SMS will be sent to your pre-assigned number in the event that foreign SIM card is inserted in your phone. This function is protected with password, so that no one other than you or someone else who knows the password could disable the Tracker.
