Samsung SGH E490

The E490 also comes with a few games that are quite entertaining to help pass the time. Arch Angel is a 3D, Space Invaders styled game that's looks pretty darn good actually. There's also a football game called Freekick (also quite good). Some of the other games are Mini Golf and Asphalt Urban GT, which refused to play for some reason. I hope that was a problem with just this one phone though. There are a couple of other Java based games as well. Though not as good as these, they are fun to play however.

Other features are pretty standard with converters for almost everything from weight to currency, a world clock in case you're a frequent traveler, a stopwatch and timer, calculator, alarm and calendar function for storing reminders, memos and to-dos.

On to media now - although the phone does have an MP3 player and supports video playback, I wasn't impressed with the sound quality or volume. It's way too low for a noisy city like Mumbai. And since I couldn't use any other earphones (Samsung propriety slot) I have to say that the output really was way too low. There aren't any EQ presets either to make any sort of adjustments. On the plus side, the player's interface is quite snazzy with 2 visualizations to choose from.

Another problem with the E490 is that it doesn't play back a lot of standard formats. Even though I copied a few .mp3 music and .3gp video files that played on all other phones, they refused to play on this one for some reason. I kept getting errors like – media type not supported. Odd! Even though it's supposed to read MP3 and AAC file formats. Having a voice recorder doesn't really help make up for the lack of an FM radio unfortunately.