It's small, offers a glorious screen, nifty sliding mechanism and a whopping 1-megapixel camera: Editor-in-Chief Jørgen Sundgot spends time with the Samsung SGH-D710 at CeBIT.
Having until only recently apparently abandoned the Symbian OS platform, Samsung today offered visitors to the CeBIT fair in Hannover a surprise viewing of its new SGH-D710 - the successor to the SGH-D700 flip-and-swivel model which Samsung announced in 2003 but was never launched. This time around, Samsung has aimed for a less ambitious design and resorted to a simpler, yet ultimately more functional sliding mechanism. Oh, did we forget to mention a veritable smorgasboard of advanced features?
Kicking off the feature fiest with a glorious, 16-bit screen and a one-megapixel camera, the SGH-D710 joins Nokia's own 7610 among the ranks of megapixel-capable smartphones of any platform. It's not only light, at 110 g, but also small at 10.1 x 5.1 x 2.4 cm, yet manages to pack a solid punch despite its minute appearances.
 | Samsung SGH-D710 (Photo: Jørgen Sundgot)
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Utilizing a sliding mechanism which is far more comfortable than that of, say, the Nokia 7650, the SGH-D710 is quite a looker of a handset. Under the hood, there's the usual compliment of Series 60 applications, as well as 64-tone polyphonic ringtones, support for voice recognition, video recording and playback. The latter benefits from the built-in 64 MB of ROM and 32 MB of RAM available to users, but the D710 also offers users further storage through its support for the brand new RS-MMC format - essentially an half-sized MMC card.
A quick play with the SGH-D710 didn't only reveal that the handset is comfortably small, but also ergonomically sound with an excellent keypad - perhaps with the exception of the navigaional pad, which offered horrible tactile feedback. This (and the fact that it has an antenna) aside, the smartphone performed smoothly, and offered up excellent picture quality through its integrated camera - topping off the experience with a relatively smooth viewfinder and nice colour scheme for the default theme.
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