Jun
18
Fascinating as they are, ultra high-end handsets are not everybody’s cup of tea. In fact, the good old mid-range is the bread and butter for every successful mobile phone company, for that’s what gets those sales numbers right. As we see it, Samsung i550 might just be the phone to perfectly fit this description. It doesn’t yell expensive out loud, but has great all-round functionality and might just become tomorrow’s classic.
Key features:
- 2.6″ 262K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution
- 3G with HSDPA
- Trackball navigation
- Built-in GPS receiver
- Symbian OS with S60 user interface
- Wi-Fi (Samsung i550w only)
- 3 megapixel camera with auto focus
- MicroSD card slot
- 3.5mm stereo audio jack
- FM radio
- Decent battery life
- Bluetooth with A2DP support
Main disadvantages:
- Tri-band GSM support only
- Trackball is somewhat slow
- No two-step shutter key
- No Wi-Fi (Samsung i550)
- A bit too conservative looks
- Video recoding limited to QVGA resolution
- Awkward soft key layout
- No RDS
When first announced, the Samsung i550 had only one version and it crucially lacked Wi-Fi. However, just as it started hitting the shelves, a second WLAN enabled version named Samsung i550w popped up. The two versions have no other differences in terms of hardware or software. Anyway, the second version places Samsung i550 in a somewhat different league - handsets that have it (almost) all. It may not have the best camera or GPS receiver around but performs adequately in both departments and that is what really matters most of the time.
Right now the Samsung i550 seems to have no direct market rivals. It’s considerably cheaper than Nokia N82 and N95, or Samsung G810, which makes any comparison unfair. Even the N95 classic costs more than what you would pay for a Samsung i550. All of these handsets have a number of extra features on top of what the i550 has to offer but, as we found out, they’re all on par in terms of usability and user friendliness.
Nokia N78 is probably the most similarly equipped phone but we are yet to see its market release. Nokia haven’t been so kind of supplying us with pre-release handsets for testing - a rather quirky marketing decision.
So for now, Samsung i550 is the only handset in this market niche and that seems a good enough stepping stone to success.
One last thing before the actual review gets going. The Samsung i550 we had for the test was a beta unit, some i-dotting and t-crossing short of being ready for the shelf.
Design and construction
If we must summarize, we would definitely call Samsung i550 conservative. It does have its strong points but is by far not the most inspiring handset in terms of design. In fact, the plastic used on its body looks downright cheap. To put it mildly, we weren’t impressed.
In terms of size the Samsung i550 stands at 115 x 53 x 13.8 mm, a decent and quite pocket-friendly achievement. It is surely on the slim side of smartphones and one of the slimmest to offer a similar or better feature pack.
Samsung i550 will be offered in two color versions -black and silver. Frankly, we do appreciate the silver one more but the black one isn’t that much of an eyesore either. Anyway, appeal is not what this handset is about.
The front panel of the phone is dominated by the large 2.6″ display. The earpiece is located right above it, dead center. In the left corner is the video-call camera. No surprises here.
Under the display is the trackball, which is the key navigation tool in the phone. We do like trackballs and this particular one had every chance of impressing us. Well, it failed. It was far too slow and needed a whole lot of rolling to move a single icon. It might be Samsung’s first go at trackballs but we still expected more. Anyway, we are going to get back to the trackball and the rest of the keypad a little later in our review.
The left side of Samsung i550 features the microSD card slot, the volume rocker and the neck/wrist strap eyelet. The volume rocker has nice ergonomics and tactility but is a little too hard to press for our taste.
On the right side of Samsung i550 we found the USB slot and the dedicated camera key. The latter was a real downer for the lack of a half-press, which makes operating the camera rather unnatural. We can’t see any good reason for Samsung doing such a thing but, after all, the camera is not the key feature in i550 so it may as well get away with that.
Topside of Samsung i550 we have the power key and the 3.5mm jack. The power key also gives access to the ringing profiles. We find the location of the 3.5mm jack very convenient; it’s most comfortable for wearing the handset in you pocket with headphones plugged in. The bottom part of Samsung i550 is quite plain. The only adornment here is a wide gray stripe.
At the back side of the phone is the 3 megapixel camera lens. It goes with a LED flash which, as you may have guessed, is rather inadequate. Producing good night photos is hard for even the best equipped cameraphones and Samsung i550 falls seriously short of being one of them. There is also a self-portrait mirror backstage so you can frame you self-portraits better. More about the camera is coming up in the dedicated part of the review.
Removing the battery cover reveals the 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery. It will keep you going for a good 3.5 days under moderate use (a few calls and messages plus about 40 minutes of using the other phone’s features a day). It is about what you expect, given the size of the screen. Plus, Wi-fi and GPS take their toll on battery life too.
To summarize, we are pleased with the build quality of Samsung i550. It looks sturdy and problems such as paint peeling seem very unlikely. What we are not happy about however is the rather cheap look. It’s a fine line between neat and cheap but we, for one, were on the wrong side of it.
The ample display is good
As already mentioned, Samsung i550 is equipped with a generously sized 2.6″ 262K-color display. The supported resolution is QVGA (320 x 240) pixels, which is about as much as most other Symbian devices will offer.
As far as picture quality is concerned, Samsung i550 is doing pretty well. It has good contrast and brightness. Although we’ve seen better from Samsung, the i550 is still good enough.
On the negative side, the i550 has the typical weak legibility under direct sunlight. On a bright sunny day it is quite a challenge to find a proper angle for working with the phone. We are starting to wonder if Samsung is ever going to do anything about this. After all, there are plenty of other manufacturers to manage displays of great picture quality and adequate sunlight legibility (Nokia and Apple come to mind straight away).
Keypad is a no-go
The alphanumeric keypad on Samsung i550 is decent, allowing quick enough typing. It might not be the best looking keypad in business but it does the job.
The keys are rather minimalist in size, the spacing between them however is enough to provide adequate touch orientation. Still with the amount of space available for the keypad we wish Samsung did a bit better. After all, business device or else, typing should not let Samsung i550 down.
We are quite sure that a little time spent with Samsung i550 should solve the thin key problem and users will speed their way through the lines of text.
The real problem with the keypad of Samsung i550 are the six keys placed around the trackball. Those are arranged contrary to any logic and really got on our nerves during our reviewing. The problem is that the more frequently used soft keys are smaller than the dedicated web and GPS buttons. Now, don’t get us wrong - having shortcuts to those two features is great but the implementation in i550 is disastrous. In addition, the shortcuts keys launch the corresponding application regardless of the currently open menu item. If the selection keys were placed at least on the same level as the shortcuts a lot of wrong presses would have been avoided. Instead, the elevation of the shortcut keys really makes it as bad as it can get.
The trackball itself is another controversial part of the Samsung i550 hardware. As much as we like trackball navigation, we just couldn’t let it get away with the painfully slow response. Rolling a thumb all the way we only managed to move about two icons in the menu. Scrolling through very long lists (usually in the gallery or file manager) will probably take quite a lot of time and effort.
Backlighting is also somewhat uneven. Still, with the sufficient spacing between keys usability in dark environments doesn’t suffer that much. In addition the trackball is pleasantly illuminated in blue and that looks really cool.
All in all, apart from the decent typing, the Samsung i550 keypad is a sounding failure to us. We do hope the trackball speed has been corrected in the retail version making navigation at least passable.
Telephony
Quite as expected, the i550 lives up to Samsung’s reputation as regards reception and in-call sound. Voice clarity on both ends of a call is commendable and in terms of clear reception it’s completely competitive to what other manufacturers have to offer.
User interface
Samsung i550 is running on the Symbian 9.2 OS and uses the well known S60 3rd edition graphic user interface. The Feature Pack 1 also comes pre-installed. It brings in a bunch of nice upgrades to the original 3rd edition, such as multiple alarm slots and longer voice recording capabilities.
In general the result has turned out very good. Samsung i550 is one snappy device with great handling. Looks are also quite decent with the handsome Samsung styling of icons.
Being a Symbian handset, Samsung i550 features an active stand-by mode. You have a bar of shortcut icons for instant access to pre-selected functions at the top of the display, while scheduled events from the calendar along with the currently playing track or radio station (if any) get displayed underneath.
When assigning Active Standby shortcuts, you can choose any application or even a website. The functionality of the two soft keys is configurable too. Another standby screen feature that we really like is the Google search bar giving instant access to the search engine.
The phone has 5 profiles plus an offline mode that switches off all transceivers. It is also the default profile if you start the handset without a SIM card. The offline mode allows full access to the functions of the phone that do not require cellular network coverage. All the profiles can easily be edited to best suit your needs.
As with any other S60 smartphone, the task manager of Samsung i550 pops up upon a press-and-hold on the Menu key. It allows switching between applications or turning off any running application by pressing the Clear key.
There are only two different menu views for the i550 but they are practically what the majority is using. Whether the icons will appear as a 4 x 3 grid of icons, or as a standard list, is completely up to the user.
Finally, Samsung i550 has a voice recognition feature that (supposedly) allows you to control the whole user interface without even having to touch the phone. It does all right but still not as well as we hoped. Although speaker independent, the application has trouble recognizing some user commands, especially the longer ones. It’s still a good help on some occasions and, given the beta status of our unit, it may even be better in the retail version of Samsung i550.
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