Samsung i7110 - the good path

Introduction, accessories

The success of Samsung i8510 Innov8 made it clear that Nokia is not the only company who can make good Symbian phones. Of course it’s still a fact that the Finnish guys are the ones who do it big time, we cannot really find “bad” handsets amongst N and E series phones. Otherwise Nokia’s non-secret aim is to make their Series 60 platform first in mid-range handsets too, after the business and multimedia line, at least in their product portfolio. It seems that they are doing fine until now, Symbian-based Nokias are highly successful both amongst users and the press, while the Series 60 platform has started to become a default on musical phones after business and multimedia models.

On the other side this is a relatively new platform for Samsung, but they are taking its development seriously, and they are doing it wisely: Innov8 is good in those things that are the weak spots of the rival N96, while in the case of i7110 we can observe the same things, only that the great rivals are now N82 and N79. This makes the Koreans really ambitious, and their aim is still not less than catching up on the Finnish market leader, and this seems less and less unrealistic.

The rivals

As opposed to the 8 megapixel phone, i7110 didn’t have a strong marketing campaign before its launch, we might even say that it came from nothing. Of course rumors were spreading since a long time ago on the internet, but it looked very different on the first leaked pictures. It was a great surprise when I took the phone, provided by XXL GSM, into my hands, which came in a large, cool box. We’re very good with accessories, besides the charger and the data cable we also get a 1 GB microSD card, an adapter for this, a car charger and holder, and an in-ear headset made of two parts.

Exterior

N79 and N82 are great phones. Still, I wouldn’t like to have any of them, as I have the same problem that I had with N95: they are not that high-quality in terms of materials and assembly, as a 300 euro handset should be. I just have a brand new Made in Finland (the better one) N82, and the poor guy has ts bottom left corner crack when typing an SMS and I need no magnifying glass to spot the gaps. Samsung i7110 is targeted at users like me: the new model is made of metal. Nokia fans could immediately say that E75 is made of metal as well, but i7110 has a metal front panel as well. It’s still not as large as N82. as although it has quite a large weight (125 grams), it’s still only 12.9 mm, opposed to N82’s 17.3 mm. Of course it’s not an ultracompact handset, as its two other size parameters are 118 x 52 millimeters, but thanks to being quite slim, it still won’t make the impression of a huge phone.

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The design continues the U900/U800 line, metal front panel, metal keypad, metal back panel, while on the sides there are soft plastic parts. The display has a diagonal of 2.6”, QVGA resolution and it’s made with AM-OLED technology, which I dare to say that it’s the de-facto technology for the future if the manufacturers want to focus on users’ needs. In terms of image quality i7110 is much better than any model with a TFT display, the colors are bright, brightness is good and we won’t have problem reading the screen even in the middle of Sahara, as heavy sunlight won’t really affect it. The display seems large as its frame is rather slim, there is barely some space left on the top for the speaker and the secondary camera used for video calls. Unfortunately the main controls are victims of this: the optical touchpad/d-pad hybrid in the center is very easy to use, but the buttons surrounding it are very small. The design of the clear (C) key is the most terrible, it’s right near the right softkey and the call end key, I’ve pressed it accidentally lots of times while wandering around the menu – fortunately we can’t delete the main menu items, or else I would have done it. The numeric part is okay, it has a proper size and the keys have a good pressure point, and have a uniform, white backlight, just like the other keys above them.

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The back panel has only its center part made of metal (the one that can be taken off), but that’s brushed metal, which spices of the design a lot. This means that there are two relatively slim plastic parts on the top and the bottom, the one has the handsfree speaker, while the other holds the button used for taking the metal part off. In the center we can see the 5 megapixel camera with a dual-LED flash. There is no mirror for taking self-portraits, but we won’t feel the need, as the back panel will work as a mirror.

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The top part is empty, one the left there are only the volume control keys and the charger/headset/data cable connector, which is not standard microUSB, but the latest proprietary Samsung connector. This is protected by a sliding plastic door, which is an outstanding solution, but we might ask why aren’t the volume control keys on the left, as when taking pictures – or when reviewing them – that would be a great place for using them to zoom in/out. The bottom is also blank, while on the right there is the camera’s shoot key, a hotkey and the protected microSD slot that supports high capacity (SDHC) cards too.

Hardware, operating system, data transfer

The handset has the Symbian 9.3 OS with the Series 60 user interface, Feature Pack 2 – for our users who are not that good with such things, I’d note that this is the same operating system that runs on Nokia N96 and Samsung Innov8 too. According to unofficial sources, the handset has a 330 MHz MSM6260 / OMAP2430 chip, which is based on ARM11 that has hardware 3D acceleration, just like Innov8 or N82. This will be required by the eye-candy effects of Feature Pack 2. During everyday use the handset is just as fast as Innov8, so it’s much faster than N79, which has a 369 MHz CPU, but no acceleration. The internal memory has a size of 50 MB, which would be okay, but i7110 has no high-capacity flash storage. The reason is simple: Innov8 has to remain the flagship model.

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We’ve benchmarked the speed of the phone with two applications that are quite outdated by now, JBenchmark 1 and 2. These weren’t designed for handsets with Feature Pack 2, so devices with an earlier OS (like N95) get much better scores, but since we’ve published the results at Innov8 and N96 as well, we’ll do it now too. It’s important to note, that these results should not be compared with the ones of older handsets (N95, G810), as those have an older operating system, which requires less resources, so JBenchmark yields better scores.

The data transfer arsenal is complete. The GSM-module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), we can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and 3.6 megabit HSDPA for transferring data on the mobile phone network. There is 802.11b/g WiFi support, stereo Bluetooth 2.0, a GPS receiver with A-GPS (complying with the NMEA 0183 standard), an FM radio and FM transmitter that can transmit between 87.6 and 107.9 MHz. I’d like to make it clear what does this do, for those who have never heard of it. It’s a rather frequent problem that one would like to listen to music on his or her phone while in the car, but the car radio doesn’t have a line in connector, so this makes things quite hard. This is why the FM transmitter has been invented, which broadcasts sounds (including music and voice) on a preset frequency. Due to its design, it has a medium quality and short range (max. 5 meters), so it can stay legal, as in Europe (with the exception of the United Kingdom) one can use an FM transmitter with a maximum performance of 500 mW. If you’d like to know more about this topic, check out this.

i7110’s FM transmitter uses the handset’s internal antenna, it won’t work if a headset is plugged in. It has a very short range, for example another phone can receive the signal only if it’s right near the Samsung. We’ll hear some cracks even in the best case scenario, but the whole thing probably works better in a car, as a car radio’s antenna is much more sensitive to the signal than a mobile phone’s headset.

Software, phone calls

As I’ve already mentioned the operating system is Symbian Series 60, so those who have already used such a thing will have no problems – and it’ll take no more than a couple of minutes to learn for the newbies. The phone has the new kind of active standby, which makes all important software and features accessible with a couple of keypresses.

The main menu has a grid view by default with 12 icons, but we can choose a V layout as well. There are three themes, besides the default one there is one with bright colors that is not very elegant, but perfect in terms of readability. We will have no lack of software, i7110 has everything you’d need on a mobile phone. In the office menu there is a basic calculator, and advanced alarm clock, a unit- and currency converter, a notepad, a calculator with month/week/day views, a name card digitizer, a file browser, ZIP, QuickOffice and a PDF reader. Going a menu up to Samsung LBS we can find GyPSii, Travel Guides and the GPS+ application that offers faster GPS positioning. In the media menu we’ll see RealPlayer, the sound recorder, a video editor and the image browser, which has some basic editing functions as well. In the applications there are some nice things like fring, DLNA, ShoZu, RoadSync and two 3D games, FIFA 08 and Asphalt 4. I’d like to note that the handset has a gyroscope, so the image will rotate with the phone in applications that support it.

There is no problem with call-related software either. The phonebook can store contacts until it fills up the internal memory, we can create extra fields, so if we’d like to store the foot size of some of our contacts, we can do it. Messaging is also great, besides SMS and MMS messages, there will be no problem with emailing either, the client supports authenticated IMAP servers and attachments too. The call log displays dialed/received/missed calls only on separate pages, but in turn we can take a look at call durations. There are of course profiles too, ringtone volume is great, just like sound quality during calls.

Web browsing is also a great experience with i7110, of course only as good as it can be on a mobile phone. The reason for this is not only the MiniMap browser of Series 60 handsets, but also the optical “trackball”, which works like a touchpad when browsing, we can move a mouse cursor with it.

Multimedia

The handset has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and a dual-LED flash, which works as AF-light too. The highest available resolution for images is 2560 x 1920 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 640 x 480 pixels. Here we can record slow-motion videos as well, which can have a value of 1/4 or 1/8 – in this case the max resolution is 320 x 240 pixels. The camera’s software has all the settings we’ve ever seen on a phone, the only strange thing that sensitivity cannot be set with ISO values, we can just choose between “low”, “medium” and “high”. We can tamper with light metering and there are of course the usual marketing features like face recognition, exposure on smile and blink detection. As I have noticed after writing the article we can select macro mode at focusing, which is possibly used for super-close pictures, as I didn’t have to turn it on at normal macro distance (~30 cm).

The pictures are quite high-quality ones. Dynamics range is high, the colors are bright, but noise and noise filtering levels are both a bit high, fortunately not that much, we can still observe smaller details on the pictures. Macro photos are okay, and night photos are quite noisy, but still usable.

The music player is again near perfect. It can run in the background, it can be controlled from the standby screen, it – theoretically – displays album covers, has an eight-band equalizer which supports custom presets as well. The only problem is that we can set volume in only 10 steps, but we’ll forget about this as soon as we hear the sound quality, which is great, both on handsfree and the default headset. Another great thing that the headset has a lengthener with a 3.5 mm jack, so we can use our own headset, which will only be required if we don’t like in-ear headphones (similar to those that ship with SE Walkman phones), as we get one of these with i7110.

It’s important to note that the new phone support DivX video files and it has TV-out if we obtain the necessary cable.

GPS, battery, summary

The GPS hardware works fine, positioning is fast, and the signal is stable. There are some problems on the software side, as we’ll get Route 66 preinstalled (aka Samsung Mobile Navigator), which uses NAVTEQ maps. I don’t know how many maps do we get, the software can be activated via the internet and SMS, I’ve tried this method and the result was a map of Austria and six SMS messages full of Wingdings-like characters. Otherwise the software can be used for car navigation, the screen is “large” enough to see the main things and there’s the car holder and charger in the package – but it’s still worth buying GarminXT, which will hopefully run on i7110.

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The battery has a capacity of 1200 mAh, it can be changed. It’s probably due to the AM-OLED display, but the new Samsung stays on for a really long time with one charge. It stayed online during the 4-day test period, and when I took it out of the box, the battery meter wasn’t full already. During the four days I’ve been making calls for about two hours, a lot of text messages came and were sent, I’ve been playing around a lot with it, but I didn’t listen to music and used navigation only for a short test – with this I’ve managed to make the battery go dry by the end of the fourth day. I think this result needs no explanation, we haven’t really seen such a long uptime at a smartphone.

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Summary: after reading the article probably all of you see that Samsung i7110 is one of the best currently available Symbian Series 60 smartphone. It’s much better in materials and assembly quality than any other rival, as a bonus we get the tons of features and services, the advanced data transfer methods, the rich accessory list, the superb AM-OLED display, the camera that takes nice photos, the FM transmitter and the long uptime. It has only two flaws, the first is that the top part of the keypad is too crammed up, and the other is that we get Route 66 with it – this is of course due to the fact that it’s a Samsung, so it’s not a defect of the phone itself. Of course these aren’t so terrible things, one can get used to the small buttons and it can navigate, even though it’s not perfect. We add the relatively good price of about 320 euros, which is a bit higher than the price-tag of N79/N82, but those lack the professional assembly quality, have no FM transmitter, have a lower quality display and don’t have such a long uptime – and I didn’t even mention N79’s weak CPU. This might be the first handset to receive the highly recommended award and all of our readers will agree.

Samsung i7110

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

Samsung i7110 has been provided by XXL GSM.
The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu

Specifications

Samsung i7110
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS, HSDPA
	Size	118 x 52 x 12.9 mm
	Weight	125 grams
	Available colors	Silver
	Display
	Display diagonal	2.6”
	Display resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	AM-OLED
	Available colors	~262.000
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	dynamic
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	dynamic / 300KB
	Internal memory	50 MB
	Memory expandability	microSD (max. 16 GB)
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz (GSM) 900/2100 MHz (UMTS)
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	yes (384 kbps) / yes (3.6 Mbps)
	IrDA / Bluetooth	no / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	USB	2.0 (Samsung connector)
	Push-to-talk / RSS	yes / no
	GPS receiver	yes
	Basic functions
	Profiles	yes
	Vibra function	yes
	Built-in handsfree	yes
	Voice dialing / voice commands	yes / yes
	Sound recorder	yes (max. 1 hour)
	Alarm clock	yes, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Symbian 9.3 Series 60 Feature Pack 2
	WAP / HTML browser	yes / yes
	E-mail client	yes (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	yes, MIDP 2.0
	Games	FIFA 2008, Asphalt 4
	Currency converter	yes
	Extra software	QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip, ShoZu, DLNA, Fring, RoadSync
	Multimedia
	Main camera	5 megapixels, autofocus
	Secondary camera	yes
	Video recording	VGA @ 30 fps or QVGA @ 120 fps
	Music player	yes, can run in background
	Equalizer	yes
	FM radio	yes, FM-transmitter too
	Battery
	Main battery	1200 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	440 hours (GSM) / 430 hours (UMTS)
	Talk time	11 hours (GSM) / 5 hours 50 minutes (UMTS)
	Other
	FM-transmitter, TV-out, gyroscope, optical touchpad, slow-motion video recording, DivX playback