The C100 continues to look good when you first try using it. The nicely laid-out keyboard comes to life with a trendy crisp blue backlight and the colour screen passes through a jolly opening graphic to a colourful, clear front screen.

The phone book is much the same as most new phones – a large capacity (up to 500 entries) and the ability to specify several numbers for each person. Yet in use, it falls down. On my Nokia phones, it’s been possible from the opening screen just press the down scroll button to instantly access the name list. On this Samsung, it’s necessary to press ‘Names’ then ‘Search’ and then start scrolling. When you do get to an entry, you must press ‘View’ and then ‘Call’ – there’s no quick shortcut to a default number. In fact, there’s no default number at all – so the numbers for each contact are sorted in the order that’s convenient to the phone, not to you! It just seems that everything takes one or two more button presses than is natural. This may not seem much, but it makes everything slow and tedious.

Incoming messages are handled fairly well. There’s space for up to 100 messages – though the phone seems keen to display pointless warnings that you’re out of space on your sim card rather than just automatically make use of the extra space. You can also choose a variety of incoming message tones, and there’s also a flashing light on the phone which pulsates prettily through rainbow colours when you have a message waiting. This is very helpful if, say, you’ve popped out of the room as you only have to glance at your phone from a distance to know if you have any messages waiting, rather than having to look at the screen. If you don’t read a message within about 5 minutes, the phone will play the message tone again, and again every few minutes until you do give in and read it. Sometimes handy, but often annoying if you’re busy doing something at the other side of the room!

For general calling use, the phone’s good with acceptable call quality and signal strength. However, the battery life leaves a lot to be desired – it won’t last more than two or three days. Even more annoyingly, you have very little warning of when the battery is a bout to die. By the time the indicator shows only 1 out of 3 bars on the battery strength scale, you’ve only got a short time left before it gives up altogether. Charging is quick, but overly-fiddly as the charging socket has a flimsy little rubber plug covering it which is both awkward to remove and highly likely to get lost within a couple of months of buying the phone.

Overall, this could have been a very nice phone. I liked some of its features, but the ease-of-use is appalling – everything you could want to do on the phone seems to take far longer than it should do, with lots of pointless extra button presses and few handy shortcuts.