Introduction
In the mobile industry Samsung is well known for announcing more handsets in a year than there are workdays. Not all of these are launched in Europe as well, but there still are some models that we don’t know about before they become commercially available. Marketing and PR focus on the big names (i8910, S8300, BeatDJ), while the simpler, less significant models don’t even always have a press release.
We can recognize new Samsung models by having four numbers, instead of three, in their model name. We still can’t see any logic in the C, E, M and S-series model numbering, but this is not a new thing. There might be a Korean man, who knows why did a phone get the specific model number, but I think this guy is at least a celebrity over there and he stars like a talking parrot in the circus.
The subject of our current review has been shipped by XXL GSM, and to tell the truth I’ve just picked it from their list, not knowing what it is. I’ve received a phone with a rather fine design and features, in the usual Samsung quality and specifics. It has turned out relatively soon, that S3110, in spite of not being bad, has a flaw that we won’t see in the specifications, only if we start using it.
Exterior
Let’s start with the problem. The candybar phone, that even looks fine, has a huge flaw, the design of the OK button in the middle of the navigation ring. It’s not just small, but it’s even placed deep, and as a bonus it’s even longish, to make it even harder to hit. The little bastard has another bug, but this is really just the icing on the cake: when pressing it on the standby screen it opens up the WAP browser, so the poor user, who is quite happy about being able to press the button, and then he gets this.
This bug really hurts, as S3110 is otherwise rather ergonomic. The design is solid, but elegant, the materials used and the assembly quality are exemplary. In the box we’ll only find a simple stereo headset besides the charger, but I didn’t even expect anything else. The keypad is also okay, but it’s still not easy to type an SMS, as the software is shockingly slow. The display, however, is good, the 176 x 220 pixels resolution is enough in this category.
The sides of the silver case don’t offer a plethora of special buttons, we’ll see the volume control keys, the door of the microSD slot and the small plastic piece covering the proprietary charger connector. The back panel isn’t complicated either, it’s a big, flat, shiny, slippery black piece of plastic, while on the top there is a really modest camera that looks rather lonely.
Somehow the whole phone suggests the feeling of humbleness, the designers didn’t want to create anything ostentatious or extravagant, they’ve designed an everyday article for personal use, but then someone has mistyped a value for the navigation button, and the whole thing failed. I just can’t understand how couldn’t anyone observe this, or it might be that someone noticed it, but he was told off, like “hey, Himuchi, you’re the lame one and shut up, we don’t have the time to redesign the whole thing, we have to draw 47 new phones today”.
Then Himuchi went over to LG, and they hate him since then.
Basic functions
The interior of the little Samsung won’t be no surprise. We’ll see the graphical elements introduced in the Soul series, we can have three themes, these cannot be edited. We can only tamper with the screen brightness and that’s it. The upper part of the navigation button brings up the quick menu (here we can see four features that can be modified), while pressing it down, we’ll launch the camera. The left key creates a new text message, while the right button launches the music player.
The menu system’s speed is basically okay, but it can really slow down in two cases. The first is text entry, I’ve already mentioned this, while the other is the full system slowdown if there is music playing in the background. In this case we can feel that any movement is slow, which is okay, as no rock band would be happy to keep opening up their notebook during a concert, but I would expect such a dual functionality from a phone.
We can store 1,000 entries in the contact list, while the usual extra fields aren’t missing either. Another usual lack is that this Korean wonder isn’t able to do voice dialing either. Messaging is simple, we have SMS, MMS and email client as well, the numeric keys are good, and I’ve already mentioned speed. The email client supports file attachments too.
The first surprise at PIM functions was that S3110 can open Office documents and PDF files. I can’t say it’s lightning fast, it will take some time, but than we have the document, which can be zoomed in and out (this time we don’t use Picsel Viewer for this, but it’s a native feature).
The calendar, the alarm clock, the world clock, the to-do list… they are all like on any other mid-range Samsung phone. The calendar has month and week views, we can store four kinds of events. The calculator supports some trigonometric functions, the stopwatch, the converter and the countdown timer all work in the usual way.
Multimedia
The hole on top of the back panel has a 1.3 megapixel camera behind it, but we shouldn’t expect much of it. As much as we’ve been surprised by the 3.2 megapixel camera on M7600 BeatDJ, this little bump is just as terrible. The portrait viewfinder reminds us of old times, the options are limited to the most important ones. You can have a look at the pictures below, which are good for demonstrating all possible faults of a camera on a mobile phone. Blurriness, fuzziness, burnt in parts, bad colors and lack of details are characteristic, besides a high noise level.
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The musical part is somewhat better. The MP3 player is a nice one, it has three kinds of layouts, but the only difference is that the album cover is displayed elsewhere, so in fact it doesn’t matter which one do we select. The tracklist has the usual grouping by ID3 tags, the software can run in the background and we can see its state on the standby screen.
There is timed shutdown, stereo Bluetooth support and we have preset EQ settings to choose from. The handset has a nice sound quality in handsfree, it’s not world champion, but it’s clearer and louder than the average phones, and it even uses the same speaker that we do during calls. This also means that calls can be heard very clearly on handsfree, I had no problem using it even in the car.
The headset is a very simple one, all it can do is that it’s stereo. The connector is a proprietary Samsung standard, and since the accessory cannot be taken apart, we’ll be forced to use this one (or a Bluetooth headset), if we don’t manage to acquire some special converter. We will need it in order to use the FM radio. Theoretically the little Samsung displays RDS information as well, but practically it might be that I live in a bad place, or the receiver is too sensitive, as I didn’t see anything like that.
Data transfer, summary
S3110 is not the best choice for data transfer. At local level we have Bluetooth (2.0), and cable connection, but we first have to buy one, as it’s not included in the package. On the mobile network the EDGE protocol is the fastest one supported, so we shouldn’t expect 3G or its relatives. The browser is appropriately basic, if someone would still like to browser HTML sites, we highly recommend Opera Mini.
The battery has a surprisingly good performance. Of course Samsung didn’t mention the exact value, but it doesn’t really matter: the handset had an uptime of four days, which is not very usual with my quite powerful usage habits. Bonus point for that.
Summary? This is a bit weak for nearly 140 euros. Of course this is the starting price, and a good example for a rival would be Nokia 3110 Classic, which had about the same price. Remaining at Samsung we can get almost the same features from E200, which comes at 100 euros. Even if its price will fall, S3110 still won’t get any award from me, as this keypad and the software slowdowns ruin the user experience.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Additional pictures in the gallery.
Samsung S3110 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 S3110 | ||
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General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 109 x 46 x 10.9 mm | |
| Weight | about 85 grams | |
| Available colors | silver-black | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2” | |
| Display resolution | 176 x 220 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262,000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 295 KB | |
| Internal memory | 21 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 900/1800 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | no / no | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | no / 2.1 A2DP | |
| WiFi | no | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | no / no | |
| GPS receiver | no | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | no / no | |
| Sound recorder | yes | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / xHTML | |
| E-mail client | yes (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 9 demos | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | image editor | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 1.3 megapixels, fixed focus | |
| Secondary camera | no | |
| Video recording | yes (H.264 format, 160 x 120 pixels) | |
| Music player | yes | |
| FM radio | yes - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | ? | |
| Talk time | ? | |
| Other | ||
| - | ||
