Review of the Samsung SGH-E900 Mobile Phone
Admittedly, the Samsung E900 is a stunner of a phone, but whoever said “looks can be deceiving” couldn’t have been more right. After 1 month of battling with its incapability and annoyances, we were ready to throw it out of the window. Design |
| Sliding phones are the most attractive by a mile, with their slim, neat design they sit wonderfully in your pocket. The E900 is very attractive indeed, and adding to its sexiness is a large colourful screen, which is made to look like it seamlessly continues down into the area where the touch-sensitive buttons are located. In between these buttons is a 5-way control pad (four directions and a centre enter button), which is outlined in shiny sliver, keeping in line with the striking design. In fact, when reviewing this phone a colleague had the LG choc phone, which we noticed was a bit too similar in design. Naughty, naughty. Around the edges are a power button, a charging / headphones port, which is covered over by a small plug that pops out at any opportunity. There is also a media launch button and a volume control. On sliding the phone upwards you will notice that it reveals the camera lens and flash on the underside. You’ll also find some yawningly boring buttons situated in straight rows, like you’d expect to see on your GCSE scientific calculator. Apart from the boring keys, once you start to press them you’ll notice that the phone’s design is weighted all wrong, making it practically impossible for one-handed use. |
| Features |
| The initial impression given off by the design is that the E900 is going to perform well. Wrong. Its exhaustive features list includes a 2-megapixel camera with 4X digital zoom and flash, and you can have fun playing with the effects available. And not to be mistaken for a digital camera alone, you can choose between single, multi or mosaic shots, and even control white balance and ISO settings. The excitement on the face of the E900 is thanks to the 262,144 colour TFT LCD screen using 240 x 320 pixels. It does perform very well too, when you start the phone up the Samsung bubbles appear on the screen to show you what it is capable of. Other capabilities include video recording, video playback and video messaging, as well as normal SMS messaging, of course. Music is catered for well by the E900, with 64 polyphonic and MP3 ringtones, music player and dual music access. If you need to view documents it lets you do this offline, and you can use it in conjunction with Pictbridge or Bluetooth if you wanted to print. Connectivity is good, with Bluetooth Wireless Technology, SyncML, USB and TV output. As the E900 was meant to be a phone predominantly, it would be good to mention that you can use speakerphone on calls as well as all the basic call options like caller display, call barring and call waiting. Unfortunately the E900 has tiny memory of 80MB, so you can only save a few photos and up to 200 text messages. |
| Performance |
| The exciting first hour of getting a new phone wore off soon after getting the Samsung E900 out of the box. Charging it up and inserting the Sim card was easy enough, but once all that was taken care of we saw this phone’s true colours. As mentioned earlier, the phone is difficult to hold in one hand, making it extremely impractical. Another problematic feature we came across was the use of speakerphone. As with most phones, you dial the number, wait for it to start ringing and then you get an option for loudspeaker, well, not with this one. You have to dial, wait for it to ring, choose options (without accidentally sliding the phone back down, like we did on a few occasions) and then choose loudspeaker. By this point they have already answered and hung up, that’s if you haven’t already cut them off. The touch sensitive buttons drove us bananas. You can’t do anything without accidentally pressing the buttons and losing everything you were doing. Another annoyance was when looking through our photos we couldn’t find how to zoom in on them, however we didn’t care because the photos taken were all so blurry they were never worth keeping anyway. The flash did work very well, it even doubled up on as a torch to help us play cards on a badly lit night boat on one occasion. The last annoyance with this phone is how easily it scratches. Admittedly, it did go on holiday so it saw quite a bit of sand and hung around at the bottom of a handbag for a few weeks, but there is no excuse for this amount of damage. One of the scratches was so deep it allowed the internal light to shine through, making it look like a crack. |
| Overall Opinion |
The E900 is a badly designed mobile phone. There is nothing about the phone that was easy or pleasurable to do. The front design is nice but as soon as you slide it up it loses its attraction. However, there is a positive side, due to the terrible performance, we were hesitant in using it which kept last month's phone bill to a minimum. |
| By Natalie Powdrill |
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Pros + Average battery life |
Cons - Badly designed - Poor quality photos - Hard to use - Easy to scratch |
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Overall Rating 
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By Lisa Malyon
13/10/2006 at 4:11:14pm
13/10/2006 at 4:11:14pm
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