Updated 15 Feb, 2012, 9:55 am IST

REVIEWS / MOBILE PHONES / SAMSUNG

Samsung SGH-P310

20 Feb, 2007, 1:38 pm IST | Aalaap Ghag | Mobile phones

The phone has an excellent, 256k-color QVGA resolution screen, shown in proper 1.33:1 landscape aspect. The screen looks great because of the relatively small size (around 1.9 inches). The resolution is the same as the screen on the E61, but being around half its size, the P310’s display looks so sharp and clean, you won’t be able to spot the pixels here. The display is bright and clearly readable in bright sunlight as well.

Below the display, you’ll find your usual soft keys, but these aren’t buttons. They’re a part of the screen and are touch-sensitive keys like the ones found on the exterior of the LG Chocolate. There are several problems with these keys. First of all, it didn’t make any sense to include just two touch-sensitive soft keys while the rest of the keypad is going to be regular buttons. Secondly, the soft keys aren’t very responsive. Repeated presses in succession get missed, so you need to wait a second before you press it again. This can get quite annoying when you need to use it in conjunction with the normal keys below.

The numeric keypad below features regular keys that offer good tactile feedback, but adjacent keys are clubbed together with no demarcations between them, so finding the keys without looking is quite difficult. Moreover, the lower rung of keys, which includes the '0' and symbol keys, has been moved to the side, which causes a serious bit of disorientation. Even the Ok button is moved away from the center and put under the green call key. It makes way for a big navigation disc, which looks like it can be used like the iPod’s wheel, but its just a simple 4-way direction pad.

Usually, the OK button is on the center of the 'd-pad' and that’s why the user interface shows context sensitive icons in the center of the screen, but that wasn’t changed for this phone when they moved the OK button. So you see the action displayed in the center, but the key is on the left side.

There’s another irritating behaviour of the keys. When the keypad gets locked, the combination to unlock the keys is camera key and *. The camera key is on the side and the * key is on the front, which, given the size of the phone, can only be accomplished with some sleight of hand.

This is where the complaints end. Apart from the keypad issues, there’s nothing else to complaint about.

The phone is a tri-band GSM handset. Quad-band is commonplace in higher end phones, but it has been left out of this one. If you’re a frequent international flyer, you might land up in places where you can’t get this phone to work.

The phone supports GPRS as well as EDGE networks for internet connectivity and multimedia messaging. The web browser included in the phone is a full xHTML-capable like the one found on the Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition phones. It does a pretty good job of rendering the web and the wide aspect of the screen makes the browsing process quite natural, but it did run into problems running some interactivity-based JavaScript. In comparison, the S60 browser is much better.

The phone has support for Bluetooth along with A2DP stereo profile support.

It also has USB. There’s no Infrared or WiFi. I mention WiFi here because with the leather jacket on, this is a very business-class looking phone, so a corporate user might be tempted to pick it up. If you fit into this category, you should know that you won’t be able to use it with your office WiFi networks.

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Tags: Samsung

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