Introduction
Samsung launches so much phones that it is impossible to trace even by us. E840 was not even familiar when GSM Takács offered it for reviewing, so I quickly looked up if we have already written about it and I also checked it’s launch date and I have seen that it was announced together with E950, so it’s quite fresh meat.
Press photos had an elegant, silver colored phone on them, but when the flat box arrived then an irritatingly pink handset popped out of it. Ouch. No problem, it matched perfectly with the Kylie concert, but I was careful when taking it out of my pocket on the street.
E840 is a completely ordinary phone that has nothing extra besides it color. It fits Samsung’s range of products, this has no 3G, but it has TV-out and it’s of course far from perfect, but its silver edition might even be used by men. It won’t be the one phone of the manufacturer, stores won’t be stormed for it but there will surely be some people who will read the specs and say: that’s it, that’s the exact phone I want to buy. But before they take this decision, they will hopefully read this review too, as life’s not a bed of roses with E840.
Hirdetés
Exterior
We can only find the most necessary stuff inside the package: charger, USB cable, stereo headset, CD and a thick manual are the list of accessories shipped with E840. The handset itself has a very unusual color, as it has a bright and shiny shade of pink. It’s as if they had mixed this color by chance, or as if they have used the boss’s wife’s lipstick. Since it also has a silver edition, we won’t be talking too much about this.
Apart from this, the slider has a pleasant design, it’s thin enough, it has the shapes characteristic for the manufacturer, but if I’d see the silver one, I couldn’t tell which Samsung is this from the many. Which helps in identifying it is that the function and call handling keys under the large QVGA display (2.2” diagonal) are touch-sensitive, but the navigation control is not extravagant at all. We have to mention that the upper margin is taller than the bottom and side ones. This has two effects: on hand moving upwards in the menu is very easy and on the other hand this margin is also used for replacing the usual embossment, which is to help sliding the screen upwards. Well, it doesn’t help as after opening the phone we immediately get in the quick menu.
It would be high time to abandon the forced use of touchkeys for a while, as this usually needs some kind of compromise from the user’s part. We don’t only have to get used to the touch feeling, but it’s very annoying that when touching the right side of the small navigation key, one can easily touch the call end key, which immediately throws us to the standby screen.
On the left side of E840 we can see the volume control keys, the power button and the manufacturer’s standard data connector. On the right we can find the camera’s hotkey and the microSD slot’s lid. The back of E840 lacks any special features; we only get to see the camera (and a mirror) after sliding the phone open.
The keypad that appears is terrible. Using the keypad, that has a pink frame around it, is as if we were rummaging in an extremely small bowl, looking for the keys. Even more, the edge of the cover partially covers the upper row of keys, and the keys itself have a pressure point that is barely observable.
Menu, basic functions
E840’s internal setup is something like G800’s. Of course it’s BlackUI, but it’s still the one that has no theme editor: we can choose a black or a white background. The OK key takes the poor user to WAP immediately (it’s the umpteenth time we are unhappy about this, maybe sometime we’ll have our voice heard); the phone can ring and vibrate at the same time, but there are unfortunately no environmental profiles.
The menu can have an iconic or list view, the default background is the animated one we could have seen many times in Samsung phones: it displays one of the landmarks of the country we’re currently in. This is still a pleasant sight. Because of the touchkeys it’s very hard to access options during a call. This has the effect that pressing the center of the navigation key, or the lateral power button, unlocks the keypad, while closing the button ends the call. It takes some time to get used to it.
The phonebook has the usual features. It can store 1000 contacts; a contact can have many numbers, email address, picture and note attached to it. The contact list shows the content of the SIM card and the internal memory on the same page; names are easy to move around between these two storage places. It’s a nice feature that when entering numbers on the main screen the phone automatically tries to offer an entry from the contact list or the call log.
We won’t have any trouble with messaging either, in case we can use the terrible keypad. Text entry is assisted by T9, while there is a large place for storing SMS messages (max. 1000). MMS and email messages are stored on the internal, dynamic memory. The built-in email client is somewhat severe when treating attachments, as they can have a maximum size of 100 Kb. There is a nifty little wizard for setting up the application.
The list of organizer features includes a calendar with month, week and day views. It can store meeting, anniversary and task notes, 100 of each. The alarm clock is the usual one that can handle multiple time points an works even when the phone is switched off. The world clock has list view, while other apps are the usual: calculator, unit converter, stopwatch, countdown timer and to-do list.
Multimedia
There is a flash-less 2 megapixel camera sitting on the back of the opened E840. We won’t remember it as the etalon of camera phones. The landscape viewfinder and the lack of autofocus are all sign of the fact that E840 is not specialized in photography at all. This is further confirmed by the pictures taken with it, which are very noisy, even though software tries to blur contrasts. In the settings we can see the ones characteristic of the manufacturer, like ISO setup, frames, effects or a number of environmental settings.
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There is a Photo Editor too, which can be used to resize, rotate and apply effects to photos, but it takes a man to have patience for such things. When recording videos, we have a resolution of 352 x 288 pixels, this is something that the phone doesn’t have to be ashamed of.
The musical part isn’t bad either, as the MP3 player can run in the background, it displays album covers, and there are predefined EQ settings too. The volume that can be set in 15 steps is not powerful enough when playing music through the speakers, and the supplied headset is only of mediocre quality and it cannot be taken apart. This means that we can use our own headset only if acquire a separate converter. There is a built-in FM radio too, which support RDS, and this requires the headset to function, as it is used as an antenna.
Memory card browsing speed is incredibly slow. The 1 GB size of the Kingston card used for testing was way over E840’s tolerance level, as switching the 7-8 music tracks on the card caused 12-15 seconds of lockup for the software. It is good news that Office documents and PDF files can be displayed, and the whole thing can be pushed out to the TV (if we have the proper cable). The games are all familiar; the phone had full versions of Bobby Carrot and TimeRider II on it, along with some other demos.
Data transfer, battery
There is neither 3G, nor HSDPA support on E840; the fastest communication technology available for the little Samsung is EDGE. There is a NetFront browser on the phone, which can display HTML pages; we only need the nerves to wait for a complex site to load. At local level we have USB 2.0 and stereo Bluetooth 2.0. The previous needs Samsung PC Studio to be installed in order to be able to tamper with the phonebook from the PC.
Under the pink cover there is a battery that looked quite weak at first sight, moreover because its capacity is only 690 mAh. This might be weak even in monochrome phones, but E840 works for two days with it, even though the large screen probably eats up a lot of energy.
Summary? The phone costs about €165 EUR at the moment of writing this article. Probably this is the price range where there are the most phones. If it’s design won’t sell it, than nothing will, as from the same brand D900 or E740 are great opponents, and D900 even costs 25% less. But K770i or K810i are also cheaper, not mentioning Nokia 6120 classic… There is no award, and I think the reasons for this are quite self-explanatory.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Samsung E840 has been provided by GSM Takács. Thanks.
The phone can be bought online at www.gsmtakacs.hu.
Specifications
| Samsung E840 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 101.5 x 52.5 x 10.6 mm | |
| Weight | 99 grams | |
| Available colors | Ice Silver, Candy Pink, Topaz Gold, Noble Blue | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262.000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 entries | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 1000 / 295 KB | |
| Internal memory | 70 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 (proprietary Samsung connector) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | none | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung BlackUI | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | present | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | Photo Editor | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 2 megapixels, fixed focus | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | present (352 x 288 pixels) | |
| Music player | present, runs in background too | |
| Equalizer | presets | |
| FM radio | present, RDS supported | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 690 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 360 hours | |
| Talk time | 4 hours 30 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| TV-out | ||
