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Samsung’s S5603 is aimed at those looking for a lower end touchscreen handset like the LG Cookie which has reigned supreme so far. Personally, I’m not a touchscreen fan, gimme tactile buttons any day, but the touchscreen is the wave of the future and a trend that’s only getting more popular everyday. So to cater to the audience that has a low budget and still wishes to stay at the edge of this technological “revolution”, a Star was born, so to speak. Allow me to clue you in on its features and performance. Form Factor Unlike the large but slim LG Cookie, the Star is a smaller but extremely comfortable to hold light weight handset. It fits squarely into the palm of your hand and any sized pocket. It features a 2.8-inch touchscreen with volume and Zoom keys for the fixed focus 3MP (with LED flash) camera on one side and dedicated camera button on the other. A screen lock button is located above the camera key. A Universal all-in-one port is located on the top. This means you can’t listen to music or have a handsfree call with the kit while you’re charging. I absolutely hate this. The same port is also a USB connector. The Star 3G also supports external memory via microSD. What pisses me off is that it’s not a hot swap slot so if you have to ever do anything with the memory card you’ll have to power down the handset and remove the battery to get to the card. Samsung has a bad habit of sending me test pieces that don’t come in boxes but in envelopes so I’m not sure weather the large button under the display is designed to be so sticky as a five way nav-pad or is actually like that with all devices. This could be a very big problem for navigating through certain parts of the UI. It seems like a button but didn’t seem to do much unless I clicked on an edge. One side brought up a shortcut menu, the other was a return key to move backward through the menu screens. The other sides didn’t do much at all, nor could I find any settings to assign them to. I hope you do. Features and Performance Interface The S5603 uses Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz UI for getting around. It’s ok, but honestly it got a little un-responsive at times and I couldn’t seem to find the option of calibrating the screen. The gesture control system works just fine though. When the handset is locked you can simply type an alphabet anywhere on the display (that you’ve pre-assigned to a function) to unlock the handset and go straight to that function. The onscreen keypad is large but doesn’t switch to QWERTY in landscape. In other words there is no QWERTY keypad, even in the browser’s landscape mode. It’s relatively quick but as and when it comes to deleting messages; it still takes an unusually long time. The vibration for incoming calls refused to work. I switched profiles and selected the Vibration Type as well which gave me feedback but didn’t actually work on calls. Needless to say I missed quite a few calls while traveling. I also found that if I selected a music file as ringtone the volume was drastically low when a call came in. The same scenario repeated itself for alarms only this time the default sounds were also too low causing me to get up late quite often the past few days. I really hate Samsung’s Image viewer application as it still doesn’t allow you to view portrait images on the full screen nor edit images from the same app. The gravity sensor and ability to arrange images according to color I believe is a great concept, but that’s it. The Star 3G has like others adopted a multiple desktop option with widgets. However, this time like with the HTC Magic, desktop wallpapers stretch across all three so you’ll have to find images to fit across them. It’s quite annoying as it becomes a little more difficult to personalize the desktop when an image of your girlfriend’s face gets chopped into three parts. I know she didn’t like it. |
Tags: 3 Megapixel , Touchscreen
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