Introduction
One of the last Samsung models from last year was the F490, which could have been observed live by the large public in Barcelona – we had the luck of taking the phone in our hands right after returning from the MWC, as we received it for testing. The brother of the F700 follows the path of its predecessor, in some points it has to offer more and elsewhere it has less. The thing that is common in the two handsets is that both are controlled by a touchscreen menu system.
This touch-mania didn’t start now, but it’s reaching its peak nowadays. I think there is no significant manufacturer who didn’t invest lots of cash in such a project. LG was the first to start with Prada, then came the iPhone which took people like a hurricane and now Nokia is also working on a touch-controlled Symbian GUI. Samsung started this war with a technique typical of them: the Croix system was made, this was in the F700, in the Armani and in the subject of our current review. We wouldn’t have been surprised if they would have produced about 20 similar phones with this softwarem but since then we have seen the TouchWiz interface too, which will soon succeed the Croix system.
Of course touch-sensitive screens have been with us for a while, all Palms and Pocket PCs have been using this form of control for a long time, but those are “pen-based” models, they need the stylus for control. The new trend is, however, that we get to touch the screen with our bare fingers, making it nice and greasy, smudgy, but if the menu structure beneath it is well-done, than that makes life much easier, since our fingers are always at hand, while the stylus is an unnecessary nag.
The greatest challenge for such devices is that to make them in a way that handling won’t cause nervous breakdown for users. Such a hardware (and mostly software) is needed that can face the challenges of the tips of our fingers, namely the limbs of people are usually thicker than a needle-like stylus, so such an interface is needed, where the danger of mis-touching can be reduced to minimum. From this point of view the F490 cannot show many new features unfortunately, as the Croix system didn’t change much and it wasn’t perfect in the F700 either.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
