The Samsung Soul wasn't my first choice when I was choosing my new contract phone. I'd been coveting one of those new touch screen phones and opted for the 'Tocco', which turned out to be more like uh-oh! So I headed straight back to the Carphone Warehouse and pleaded with them to take it back, and thankfully they did. Phew! So I spent about the next half an hour asking about various kinds of phone, looking for the perfect phone for my needs. Here are my priorities when choosing a new phone;
Pink
Good camera
Slide or flip (don't like bar)
Easy to text on
Well, I got three out of my four; I had to settle for a silver one. I was nearly going to get a nice Sony Ericsson but I wanted to use my existing micro SD card and the Sony only accepted their own Sony Memory Stick (their loss!)
It's about 50x105mm
and 13mm thick. Weighs 112g and is 3G (that's about all the technical info you're going to get, so if you're a gadget-geek, please accept my apologies now, as the rest of the review is just an average girl's interpretation!)
So, having decided to plump for the Samsung, I took it home to start to learn how to use it. And, to be honest, this is my least favourite part of getting a new phone; having to learn all over again. Once I'd put my SIM card in and switched it on my network immediately sent me the set up, via text, for my picture messages and internet. All I had to do was press install and it was done for me. Good start!
This is a slide phone and, when closed, the top 2/3 is the screen and the bottom 1/3 has square touch screen panel for shortcuts and is surrounded by four buttons. The top two are to select the options that appear above on the screen and the bottom two are to make and hang up a call. The bottom two also function as a shortcut to the call log and the on/off power button. The touch panel changes its functions depending on what you are using at the time. i.e. if you are using the MP3 player then it has next/last track, play, stop and pause buttons, and if you're composing a text it has the four directional cursors.
When you slide the phone up it has a flat keyboard which lights up and has 15 buttons; numbers 0-9, #, *, Cancel, mode switching and one touch video calling. On the bottom right there is a pinhole which is, I presume, where the microphone is. The back of the unit is plain and the camera lens is only visible when open. There is a camera lens on the front too, to the top left side of the screen, which at first I thought was like a mirror function, but no, this lens only comes into use on a video call (which is a function I haven't used, as I don't know anyone else who has video calling!), but hey, that's not why I chose the phone!
On the right side of the phone as we look at it is the socket for the micro SD card and a button for the camera; and on the left side is the charger/headphone socket and a +/- button for various volume functions.
The Soul has a 5 Megapixel camera and photos are Jpeg format. On full size photos they appear on my computer at about 1.75mb in size. The quality is excellent. But the only disadvantage for me is the auto focus which can't be turned off. So when you press the button it takes a second or two to focus before it captures the shot. There are plenty of settings on the camera function like shutter speed, lighting, flash, timer etc, but I don't really bother with any of that as I'm not that knowledgeable about photography.
The video capture is Mp4 and is ok for capturing the moment but not if you wanted to make a decent video, you're better off sticking to your digital camera for that one!
My favourite thing about the phone is the MP3 player. And because I have a 2Gb memory card I can store tons of songs (which I normally Bluetooth straight from my laptop) the quality of the sound is excellent and, apparently, the reason for this is that Bang & Olufsen have provided the sound technology(ooh, another piece of techno-blurb there folks!). You can set playlists, repeat, shuffle, well basically all the functions I would expect to find on an ipod or similar. You can either listen with headphones or have it on loudspeaker, and if a call comes through the player cuts off until you've finished the call when it plays automatically from where it went off. I have noticed with previous phones that using the music player can severely drain your battery, but in this case it doesn't. In fact, the Soul has had the longest lasting battery of any phone I've ever had, and that's saying something! I can safely say that even with quite heavy usage the battery will last the best part of a week without needing a charge.
The phone also has an FM radio with RDS feature (RDS incorporates information into the radio signal and provides information like what radio station it is and will often display the station's name on your screen - go me!). Unfortunately you have to have the headphones in to use the radio as they act as the aerial; you can still listen to it on loudspeaker or headphones though, but I couldn't pick up as many stations as I can on my transistor radio.
The text messaging is as easy to use as any other phone and has the T9, or predictive text feature. The only thing I was disappointed in was that it doesn't have animated emoticons, something which I really liked to include on my texts. Another thing which I was surprised at is the length of time it takes to delete. For instance, if I was deleting 100 texts in my outbox it can take about 30-60 seconds to do this, which I think is quite slow.
The phone also has a web browser which I have used a few times but get a bit frustrated at the mobile internet not being anywhere near as user friendly as a computer internet. No big deal to me, but I know the youngsters love going on facebook or MSN via their mobile, so I'm sure they'd enjoy it. And it did seem to load quite quickly too!
The phone has many other features too, like Bluetooth, voice recorder, memo, stopwatch, alarms, calendar and many more. There are a few java built-in games but they're just trial versions. I'm not fussed with games but I imagine you can download the full versions of your favourites for a nominal fee via the browser.
All in all, I like my phone; the mp3 swung it for me though. An excellent feature!
My new 'Soul' mate :o) just a shame you're not pink :o(
Previously published on Dooyoo under the same username.
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Advantages: Super slick, stylish, easy menus, does everything you want Disadvantages: Easy sending of blank messages, backlog due to slowness of loading.
Jono333 08.01.2009 (08.01.2009)
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