Samsung Ultra Edition 9.9 D830

The user interface is fast. Other than the picture gallery loading, there’s almost nothing that doesn’t instantly show up on the screen when chosen from the menus. This is one of those benefits of a firmware UI that makes me stay away from smartphones!

The 9.9 comes with the Picsel viewer for viewing Office documents such as Word and Excel on the go.

Tech
The 9.9 is a tri-band GSM handset and it supports GPRS as well as EDGE for faster data transfer. There is no 3G in this phone. There’s also a WAP/XHTML browser and MMS support, which is so standard I wonder why I even write about this anymore.

The phone has Bluetooth along with stereo A2DP support so you can rock your wireless headsets when on the move. There is no Infrared on the phone, but USB 2.0 is around to save the day.

The 9.9, like most other Samsung phones in the class, has around 80MB of phone memory and it also comes with a microSD/TransFlash memory card slot. The slot is on the outside and is hotswappable.

Multimedia
Multimedia on the 9.9 is pretty standard stuff with an MP3/AAC/WMA player. There is also the ability to use MP3s as ringtones. The speaker on the 9.9 is the same as the earpiece of the phone. When ringing, it can get really, annoyingly loud, and since the speaker is on the inside of the phone, it isn’t possible to temporarily muffle the sound by covering it with a finger.

There is no FM radio tuner on this phone, like any of the other Ultra Edition phones. Even the RAZR doesn’t have one, so if the 9.9 had added FM, it would have gone up a few points.