With its slick look and touch-sensitive buttons, the import Samsung SGH-E900 slider lives on the cutting edge of style. Will its stereo Bluetooth support help it tackle the music phone behemoths?
Review summary of the Samsung SGH-E900:
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 The Samsung SGH-E900 is an attractive slider with a clean look, a colorful, high-resolution screen and a robust music player, including Bluetooth stereo headphone support and a full 80MB of internal storage. Unfortunately, the fingerprint-prone phone suffers from so-so call quality, and the touch-sensitive music controls gave us headaches. Release: June 2006. Price: $400.
Pros: Attractive design, very lightweight. Screen is high quality. Stereo Bluetooth headphone support. Lots of internal memory.
Cons: Touch-sensitive buttons don't work consistently. Slide should be smoother. Call quality is just average.
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Full Samsung SGH-E900 Review:
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Design
The relatively lightweight (3.3 ounce) SGH-E900 slider starts off on the right foot with its 262,000-color, 240 by 320-pixel display, which looked rich and colorful to our eyes, though not very bright. The back is matte black, while the front is glossy with only a five-way navigational button visible while the slide is closed. When open, or in use, the phone reveals a set of white touch-sensitive buttons, including soft keys and dedicated music controls. Menus on the phone show the next level in the hierarchy as you highlight a selection, which was pretty convenient. The slider has a slight hitch when pushed from beneath, which means you'll probably be pressing from the middle -- thus smudging the phone's shiny face with fingerprints.
Music - Good
With stereo A2DP Bluetooth headphone support, a microSD slot, and a whopping 80mb of internal memory, the phone has some impressive music capabilities. The music player can handle MP3, AAC, and WMA files, and our tunes sounded remarkably good, although there is no DRM support for music bought from an online storefront. The external music controls comprise the touch screen buttons on the slider face -- nice, except that they disappear when the player is inactive, meaning you can't fire up the player without opening the phone. Included headphones sound below-average, and no adapter is provided to plug your own cans into the proprietary Samsung port.
Calling - Good
During our tests in New York City, calls on the E900 sounded average, with voices sounding clean enough, but with a distinct digital shade. The speakerphone is too soft to be useful outside of a quiet car or office. The phone has the ability to make two calls at once, but cannot join them for a conference call. Bluetooth, including A2DP stereo headphone support, is built in, but the lack of voice dialing makes for less-than-convenient Bluetooth calling. Dialing on the E900 was relatively easy, but the touch sensitive buttons were a mixed bag. Sometimes they required a deliberate stroke to activate, but a few times we hung up on callers when the active buttons brushed our faces. By default, though, the keys dim and lock in time to avoid accidents.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung SGH-E900 can handle SMS and MMS messages, and e-mail support is available for POP3 and SMTP servers, but there's no instant messaging to be had. The phone's messaging interface was better than average, with a clear screen capable of showing more than a hundred characters, although not a full 160-character SMS message. Sending messages required a bit more menu digging than we would like, and though the phone can search the contact list to send messages, the lack of intuitive, while-you-type searching makes this a slower process.
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Price and availability
The Samsung SGH-E900 will start selling for $400 () in June 2006.
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