Introduction
In the battle between buttons and touchscreen, currently the first are who are in a better position, but new battleships are arriving in a growing number in the latter army. Samsung, by the way, is a leader in this matter, F480 being the umpteenth device of its kind (F700, F490, Armani), and according to all signs they didn’t give up creating something great. Although the subject of our current review is full of nice ideas, it still can’t solve one of the greatest problem of this kind of devices.
I’m talking about text entry and scrolling. The first was not perfect even in iPhone, while for the latter we get a usable solution only from this American phone, and we still think that this is due to the multi-touch display used by Apple. There are pretenders, for example the splitscreen solution of LG KF600 is quite good, but there are real buttons on that one, in order to help text entry. Let’s also mention the greatest competitor of F480, which is LG KU990. This has also been born under the sign of a very similar concept.
This is quite a difficult problem, as the question of a large display and good usability should be answered at the same time, but the latter usually needs a keyboard. Although if these two are both present on a phone, then we need a device as large as a frying pan. The slider form factor might be a solution to this, but then the phone will be a bit chubby, not mentioning clamshell and rotateable models. F480 trie to live up to the expectations with all kinds of tricks, but there are some physical boundaries that cannot be crossed with this hardware.
Exterior
From the point of view of design, sketching up such a device is a serious challenge, as the front cover’s looks are primarily determined by the huge display. This is no different now either, there are only three buttons under the screen, while above it we can see the speaker and the secondary camera. The shiny black surface is of course perfect in collecting fingerprints, but it’s a good thing that there is lots of metal on the sides and on the back.
In the top part of F480’s left side there are two buttons for controlling sound volume, but fortunately we can also use them for browsing the menu; below them there is the slot of the microSD card. On the right side of the phone are the well-known Samsung connector and the camera’s hotkey. On top of the phone we can find the HOLD button, which locks the touch-sensitive surface, while pressing it again reactivates the screen.
The back of the slim phone is the one that looks the best, as there is a brushed aluminum finish waiting for some professional hands, along with a professional, very ingenious point. The lower side of the back covers the battery, but if we’d like to use the case that comes with the phone (it’s said to be leather on the outside and its velour on the inside), then we have to put in on in place of the back cover, thus the F480 still remains quite slim.
When taking a look at the package (it’s a white, promotional package, so we won’t show you a picture of it) we can observe a stereo headset (cannot be taken apart; damn) and a USB cable. We can say nothing bad about the case’s quality, but since there are no slideable, openable, pushable parts, this is the minimum. Especially for a Samsung.
Widget army
Compared to the 2.8” display, the QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) resolution might even seem small, but anti-aliasing works so good that you won’t even observe that. There are no problems with brightness either, while the white background of the menu further increases comfort, at last we’re not forced to see the dark, gloomy colors of F490. We can work with joyful, colorful icons; there can be no complaints about the graphics.
The Croix system is history, here’s the new one, that’s built on widgets, it’s called TouchWiz. And what the hell is that? – many have asked this, and that’s when I enthusiastically started demonstrating the feature that makes F480 conquer anyone. On the main screen we can pull a bar from the side, which has several icons on it, for different features. One just takes a feature and pulls it with a finger on the wallpaper, wherever he needs it and that stays there. If we’re very zealous then we can cram a whole bunch of stuff on the display, which will continuously be in front of the wallpaper.
Not all features fit on this sidebar, so we have to stroke it up- or downwards in order to make other widgets appear, but let’s take a look at them one by one. We can use classical features like the calendar, the network name, the list of missed events (this pops up by itself if something happens, but after that we can put it aside), digital and analog clock, or a simple date display. But we can also put on the wallpaper such things like a wallpaper chooser, profile changer, games or the list of birthdays. The window of the FM radio or the music player can also be displayed, but the best is that these also work after being put on the main screen, so when we tap them they can take us to the given menu, or they get displayed on top of the wallpaper and we can work with them instantly. We have a great video about this right here:
As for me I have also changed profiles by pulling the specific widget from the sidebar, set the profile I wanted to and then pushed the window back, as it took up too much space. But we can also control the music player with the buttons on the widget, the wallpaper can also be changed without entering the menu, so we can say that there are lots of positive and rational aspects of this whole widget story.
Menu, usability
Getting to the menu from the main screen is done through a nice little visual orgasm, as the whole screen turns around, and then the icons fall onscreen from the top and the bottom (12 of these in total). There is another method: the middle button from the three below the screen pops up a quick menu with five functions, the middle icon being the one that takes us to the main menu.
The white background color can be changed to black only in the main menu. The software uses pretty large fonts, so there will be no problems with visibility at all. However there are some issues with moving around in the menu, as where there is a list view we also get a scrollbar, so we should be moving around vertically. Stroking the right side of the display we can move down slowly, and the closer we are to the left side, the faster scrolling gets. This is a great idea in theory, but in practice it didn’t turn out to be perfect, and in an interesting manner because of the too large lines and fonts sometimes the software senses a press instead of a scroll so we might access a feature that we didn’t want to. It’s another thing that in my case this can even be considered fortunate, as I have found some minor things only accidentally.
F480 of course gives small shakes as a feedback for or caring touches, so when there’s no need to scroll then we can get around the menus pretty nice. The other downside of this system is text entry, which I had problems with again. It’s still much slower to type this way, which is due to the fact that longer finger movements are required to touch the keys of the virtual keyboard (thus avoiding unnecessary, accidental touches). We even get slower when typing letters on the same “button”.
During calls of course the touchscreen won’t feel anything, except if we intentionally disable this lock by pressing the center key. Fortunately the call handling keys are still active.
Basic functions
There are no outstanding improvements for the phonebook, it can store 1000 contacts, and we can search by tapping the text field on the top. This makes the virtual keypad appear, in which we can enter the first letters of the name, and then the software jumps to the name we want it to. Contacts can have more then one phone number, email and postal address, picture, ringtone and birthday attached and they can be sorted in groups.
There are no special problems with messaging, besides the issue with text entry. SMS and MMS messages are composed on the same interface, and of course upon inserting multimedia content, the message is considered an MMS. This can be done manually, if we’d like to create a text-MMS, and we can’t attach only pictures, sounds and videos, but contact list entries and meetings too. The email client also works correctly, we can attach any kind of file to emails, no matter the phone recognizes it or not.
The greatest positive aspect of the calendar is that it’s large. The month view fills out the whole screen nicely and the week view is also easy to handle. We can have meetings, anniversaries, holidays, important and private events in the calendar, the maximum number of these is (in the same order) 100, 50, 50, 20 and 20. There can be five different alarm times, with any kind of repetition we’d like, while snooze time can be set between 1 and 10 minutes in length. The list of features also includes a world clock with list view, stopwatch with lap timing, countdown timer, unit converter and a calculator. F480 can open Office and PDF documents, although it cannot edit them.
Camera
Five megapixels, autofocus, face recognition, smile detector. These are the main features of the camera, which seemed to be good, as there is a LED flash on the back of the phone. In terms of the software we can only say positive things, we have never seen such a user interface in any previous Samsung. At the fullscreen viewfinder the designers were brave enough to put icons so large for the settings menu that can be hit with fingers. In turn this interface covers almost the whole picture. But it’s good this way.
There is a huge number of settings in the software. Picture size, quality, ISO, white balance, flash, effects can all be set, we can make panoramic pictures (it uses three or four VGA resolution pictures for the final result), image sequencing is also available, along with face recognition that works pretty good and there is a timer and software-based picture stabilizer. The smile detector had no results for me, the point of which would be that F480 exposes when it observes a smile. I’ve been almost grinning, but in vain. A denture might help, or a couple of weeks of intensive solarium, as my teeth might not be shiny enough.
Before analyzing the results (pictured below), I must mention that F480 can also record videos at 320 x 240 pixels, and I have been expecting something better, to tell the truth, as the phone’s greatest rival, LG KU990, can do more than this.
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When taking a look at the pictures we can be quite content: F480’s camera is not at all bad in mobile terms. Of course noisiness is observable in darker areas, while bright spots might get burned out in some cases, but on the whole we can be satisfied with the results, as we get pictures rich in details that even have pretty good dynamics in some cases.
Picture viewing is also done in a professional way, as we can browse the pictures ,selected in the file manager, similar to the iPhone, while touching the upper part of the screen, then three thumbnails appear, so browsing is faster. The display can be rotated at the press of a button.
Musical features
The software part of musicality is really good. The player’s interface is very simple, and although there are no extra features, everything is easy to control. It has been a good idea to allocate a widget for this too, which can be put anywhere on the main screen. Unfortunately we cannot edit equalizer settings , although I had been very happy about playing with the bands on the touchscreen interface, but no matter. Tracks can be sorted and rated by several parameters, I have missed only one thing. We can’t set the currently played track as a ringtone directly from the player’s menu.
The metal casing makes F480 sound really good through the speakers, but this has been pretty much ruined by the headset that cannot be taken apart, which needs an adapter if we’d like some more professional headset instead of the medium quality one. FM radio needs a headset to function, the software has a very pleasant design, but it has a small problem. It’s great that there is automatic scanning, but if I’d like to manually set a frequency, then it’s no matter that I see the scrollbar, I can get to the frequency I wanted pretty hard, by tapping the icons several times. There is, however, RDS support, thanks for that.
Music Recognition can be launched from the radio or from the phone’s menu. This is exactly the same thing as TrackID used by Sony Ericsson. It records a couple of seconds, then via the internet it accesses a database and shoes us an artist name, a title and an album cover. CSI:Miami’s main title was just being played in the TV, so I tried this feature, and it worked perfectly.
Data transfer, battery
The little gadget supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA technologies. It has an Access Netfront browser, which is unfortunately far from being perfect. When I set it to full width view it shows the pages correctly, but I need to stroke the screen with my fingers to see everything, while if I set it to break the page by screen width, it crashes. All signs show that it just can’t handle pictures wider than 240 pixels, while Flash is also an unknown thing for him.
There is, however, an RSS reader, which is very welcome. At local level we have stereo Bluetooth support and USB, both of version 2.0. There were no problems with these, they have been working perfectly. It’s really surprising that I could use the phone with the battery, so for this it gets an extra point, and it’s value is even greater, since Samsung phones rarely receive bonuses for such things as uptime.
On the whole I can say that F480 is another step from the manufacturer on the road that leads to accepted and usable button-less phones. It’s a small step, good ideas, incomprehensible flaws, and perfect feel of quality. You could have seen on the video that this touch-controlled interface is far from perfect, even if such half-witted, button-preferring testers are using it like me. At F490’s YouTube video a couple of users told me off for being too lame for this user interface, which might be true, but I don’t think that one should make a GUI that needs days (in my case it’s weeks) of learning.
Although the last paragraph is a bit critical, I still think that more patient people can live together with F480, even more if they don’t write too much messages. I can hardly wait the first multi-touch user interface that has something else then an Apple logo on it, and until then we have these half-solutions. Still, F480 is worthy of this:
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| Samsung F480 |
Bog
Specifications
| Samsung F480 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM/UMTS | |
| Size | 98.4 x 55 x 11.6 mm | |
| Weight | 101 grams | |
| Available colors | Black-silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display size | 2.8” diagonal | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 230MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD (max 8GB) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | present / present | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present / present (7,2 Mbps) | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 A2DP | |
| WiFi | none | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| 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 | present | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung TouchWiz | |
| WAP / HTML browser | present / present | |
| E-mail client | present | |
| Java | present | |
| Games | 1 (puzzle) | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | music recognizer | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus, flash, face recognition | |
| Secondary camera | VGA | |
| Video recording | QVGA | |
| Music player | present, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | presets | |
| FM radio | present, RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 1000 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 250 hours | |
| Talk time | 3 hours | |
| Other | ||
| touchscreen, widgets | ||
