Buying a cell phone these days can be hectic especially if you do not know what you’re going to get the dent you put in your pocket. With companies like Samsung, LG and Apple jumping into the mobile segment, the competition gets tougher by the day. It helps the end user, but sometimes things confusing mainly due to the fact that almost all companies the same functions with little between them offer price.
Design
The design of the S5230 is compact and very convenient, measuring 104 x 53 x 11.9 mm and weighs only 93 grams. This special set just feels right in your pocket and make you not think your wearing a brick. Equipped with a 3-inch display with 240 x 400 screen resolution and 256k colors screen size is just enough for a regular user easier. It has three hardware buttons below the screen. Those on the side allows you to attend interviews and loose, while the one in the middle is the back key.
A simple volume rocker is located on the upper left side of the phone together with Samsung’s own port used for connecting the charger, data cable and headset. The right side of the phone is just as common, with the camera and the Hold button. The entire back is actually a plastic panel, which by the way is a fingerprint magnet. The 3.2 megapixel camera looks at you from one corner of the plastic plate. Unfortunately, the only way to the microSD slot by removing the battery, making it difficult to reach and not hot-swappable.
Interface
The Samsung S5230 comes with a slightly modified version of the famous Samsung TouchWiz interface. This latest iteration of the TouchWiz UI has the usual virtues of his predecessors, while adding some bling on. Starting from the main screen you will get something like this.
The Home Screen
The home screen has a clean interface with only the operator name displayed on. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see the whole house screen space to expand to three different screens, which the user can change the wallpaper according to their own liking. During use, I get a feeling that I’m using the iPhone, but I found this interface just because it gave me the opportunity to determine which applications or widgets to display or to create shortcuts to the most used application on each screen what I wanted. It features a simple and easy to use drag and drop function that way more convenient than any other touch phone I used on. Although Windows-based phones now have the same characteristics, but the response time of Samsung S5230 was faster than any Windows-based mobile I’ve used so far. The home screen also has three touch-enabled navigation options you an extra support for back-up of three hard buttons used to call and apply functions.
Messaging
This particular phone has three main text writing options, is the first standard cell phone buttons, the second and the most appropriate way to write text in this particular case, the full text entry keyboard layout. To use it, that all you have to do is to identify the mobile phone 90 degrees counterclockwise (landscape) and you’re good to go. The third and most interesting is the handwriting, which did not impress me, especially because of the fact that you need, press your finger to write something difficult and secondly, it’s a big disappointment if you write something too quickly . Then again, the keyboard response time and good placement of virtual keys is good enough for anyone fond of fast typing, so the handwriting instrument is rarely used.
The landscape mode while it takes some time to master, is the best way to enter text. Once you get used to it, I doubt you’d use the other two ways to input text. Here I want to mention that there is much to my surprise, the Punch key recognition on the screen worked very well for typing text. And no matter how fat your fingers are, you will not be disappointed. Apart from that, another important feature is the spelling which is almost always kicks at the right time, and prevents you from making spelling mistakes.
Browser & Connectivity
This mobile phone comes in with Samsung Mobile Browser v0.8. Page rendering is almost exactly like your favorite PC browser. If you move to the specifications part of the evaluation, you will notice that there is no 3G or WLAN, so the speed of the browser OK for most consumers, but it is a bit slow when loading content heavy pages. There was an annoying (once) function in the browser. You may have to manually select the network to connect to the Internet. Although my service provider of the WAP and MMS settings pushed to your phone as soon as I inserted my SIM card and put it on. I had to manually profile the Internet, access to Internet. WAP settings, it will only access WAP sites.
The same applies to the widget settings, which require access to the Internet. For them, all you have to do the settings in the phone settings and select the Internet connection for widgets. When finished, it will not again ask you to select the network. The bright side is that the selection of the network is very simple, unlike Symbian OS or Windows based. All you have to do is hit only twice, and your network is selected. Changing network settings is a breeze too. The browser is best viewed in a landscape view. However, there was a delay (approximately 10 seconds) to ensure a shift from portrait to landscape, but it is acceptable. Side menu buttons are useful if you do not have to dig into the menu to search for full screen mode, it is already part of the screen menu icons.
Organizer
The feature set offered by the “Organizer” should be more than enough to meet the needs of an average customer. In it, you calendar where you can store up to 300 events, check them in daily, weekly and monthly panels or see them all in a vertical scrolling list. But that is not. You will also find Notes, Tasks, World Clock, Calculator and Unit Converter here, while “Voice Recorder” and “Stopwatch” are both available through the menu of the application. “My Files” app that is actually a fully-fledged file manager can also be found in the above menu.
Call quality
Call quality is good, even when the signal drops. I have tested it on any available mobile networks, while making calls to my friends and family (and told them I was using the latest Samsung – soon to be launched – smart phone). The call quality was pretty amazing inside, however, there was a slight decrease in the noise in the open air, but nothing to be a show stopper. The speaker sound is average, but it does serve the purpose anyway. Although the signal is an indication of how well the coverage at your location, but lower signal does not necessarily mean that your call quality will deteriorate.
Camera
The user interface for the 3.2 megapixel camera that is equipped with the mobile phone is quite opposite to what the phone has to offer. It is all black, in contrast with all eye candy in the menu. Perhaps this is due to the fact that all black UI gives the impression that the whole screen as a viewfinder. The on-screen buttons are large enough to be easily pressed. And like any other camera phone these days, it comes with standard features such as setting the resolution and color for the picture, etc.
That said, one of the most distinctive features of the camera of this mobile phone is the photo-sharing tool (photo-blog feature). That allows you to easily take a picture and uploading it to one of six popular community sites, namely Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, MySpace, Photobucket and Picasa? This is really impressive because you can not really put extra effort into the image to your PC, download and then upload this feature really distinguishes itself, and at a price that comes as a treat. As you can see from the photos above, the camera takes really good pictures in daylight and can easily be compared to one of the popular Call phones a 3.2 MP camera like the Sony Ericsson K750i function, but falls a bit behind break behind closed doors or in low light. Take a look.
