Samsung's slim new music phone has dual screens and a finger-slide navigation key. Are the dual screens all they seem?
Design
Samsung SGH-F300 Ultra Music phone, like the simultaneously announced Ultra Video phone, is a very slim phone with two screens. Unlike the Ultra Video phone, one of the screens on the Ultra music is very small, not even wide enough to fit an entire ten digit phone number. The other screen is larger, at 2.1 inches, and rests above the five-way navigation key, a touch-sensitive key that works when you tap it or when you slide your finger across. The phone is very slim, less than 0.4 inches thick, which may be why Samsung left out the 3.5mm headphone jack we like to see on music phones. On the side is SIM card slot, which seems very European to us. Navigating the menus with the touch-sensitive slide was fun at first, but at times was counterintuitive; we've grown used to the popular iPod button layout where the center key selects and the top key moves up through the menus, but this is not the case on the Ultra Music phone.
Features:
The screen on the phone side of the Ultra Music phone is laughably small. The phone's menus, usually one of our favorite parts of the Samsung UI, were so small that only two menu options would fit on screen at once. When we opened the web browser, the phone asked us to type the web address onto the small screen, though without data functions accessible here at CES we couldn't determine if the phone tries to open a browser window on the diminutive display. The phone has two navigation buttons, one on each side, which makes us think that Samsung could do away with the two-sided idea and simply shrink the keypad a bit to fit on one side. Navigating the music side was easy, and we're happy to see that the phone will support all major music file types, as well as downloadable WMA DRM files.
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Pros:
Lots of supported file types. Very thin shell. Pretty interface. A2DP and FM radio.
Cons:
Phone-side screen is almost too small for phone numbers. Slide navigation can be counterintuitive. | | |
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