Soul
Samsung U900 has been announced under the name Soul in this February at the MWC exposition. It has been already evident back then that it’s going to be a really important model, as the city was full of billboards of the phone, and there were at least 10 Soul phones at Samsung’s stand. I can’t really say that it’s a top model, as there is the Symbian-based G810, i780 with Windows, F480 four touch-maniacs, but amongst conventional, classic Samsung devices, U900 is the flagship.
Soul is the abbreviation of “Spirit of Ultra”, which makes the special position of U900 even more unambiguous. Everything that Samsung knew until now in the Ultra series is now included in Soul, thus having a kind of “one and only” aspect. This has been modified a bit since MWC, as U800 has also been announced, which is the same, but it’s not a slider.
Although Soul’s specialty, the touchscreen replacing navigation buttons, has been announced with a lot of hype, we have already seen something like this from them in the case of E950, but we don’t have to go far to see something similar at the competition: LG KF600 resembles the idea very much. So U900 is an important device on the Korean manufacturer’s palette of phones, thus we have expected it to be an almost flawless handset. Still, we have received a rather small box from XXL GSM…
Box, exterior
The packaging is neat, but there’s nothing extra about it. A charger, a USB cable and a headset are sitting under the phone. As a change there are two miniCDs in the box, on of them having PC Studio and the USB driver on it, while the other comes with loads of pictures, sounds and videos besides the user manual. The phone itself, however, has a positive impression on the user by all means: it’s serious, elegant and graceful.
It’s only a bit large and flat. They’ve placed a 2.2” display and a 23 x 20 mm large touch panel on the front. The phone’s not so terrible when closed, but it gains a quite large size when we slide it open, as it’s almost 15 cm long. The high quality materials used, the great looking dark grey, aluminum case make up very well for the large size. There’s a lot of work to be done in order to take off the back, but in turn we get a perfect assembly quality… just until we slide it open.
The rim used for opening the phone is not at the bottom of the display this time, but the black plastic stripe of the front cover’s lower part is designed to be used for pushing the front upwards. There was no use designing it this way, as anyone with a normal anatomy pushes the middle of the screen during this process. The mechanics are perfect as ever, so we get to see the buttons. The font used might look strange at fist, but labels are very easy to read and later it will turn out that text entry is also okay, as opposed to what we thought at first. The pressure point is good, the keys are of an appropriate size and no matter that they are not separated from each other, they are still very easy to distinguish during typing. Still, when the phone is open, the cover has some play. It’s a pity, as this has been one of the most frequent problems with U600 too, and Samsung can make something more stable than this. The sample device was assembled in Germany, so no one can say that this is a problem of a pre-series model from the Asian market.
On the left side of U900 we can see the volume control keys and the cover of the usual data connector, while on the right there is the protected SD slot and we can also see the shortcut key of the camera here. The back of the phone is extremely plain; we only get to see the 5 megapixel camera lens in the company of a mirror and the flash – but only after sliding the phone open.
Menu, usability
The box advertises two features: Magical Touch and UCS, that is User Created Skin. The first of course is about the touch panel, which is one of U900’s specialties. The small OLED screen is the replacement of classic navigation keys. Labels are also in accordance with our position in the menu, so it’s always much more self explanatory what do we have to press. The whole thing also looks cool, as the icons have some animation when there is some kind of change.
All is nice and good until now, but how is it to control the phone this way? Well, it’s much better than I’ve expected. The number of mistaps is low, while the vibrating feedback is useful. The only situation when we can have problems is when we don’t target the touch panel, but one of the four real buttons around it, as it might happen that those with thicker fingers also touch the sensitive surface, and thus two things happen at the same time, but never the one we would have liked to. And of course not in that order. Can one get used to it? Easily. No one should have a headache about this one.
Customizability is something that U900 excels in, as UCS, mentioned above, is nothing else than a built-in theme editor, which helps us create our own themes, with splendid effects, and we don’t even need a separate software, we can do everything on the phone. We can change the wallpaper and its transparency properties, the color and saturation of icons, selections and even the colors of lists and buttons. If this is not enough we can also set a color for the touch panel, so instead of the original ivy-yellow we can set one that fits the theme we are using. We’ve also made a short video about this:
The menu has 12 icons and it’s built on the basics of the BlackUI system, but fortunately this is very hard to observe at the first pre-installed theme for example. Instead of the icon view we can also set a list view. Fortunately the middle button on the standby screen doesn’t take us to the WAP browser, and we can assign any function we want to the four direction keys, which will also result in the functions’ icons appearing on the touch panel display visible when on the standby screen. It’s important to mention that this surface also senses if we keep our finger on it, and then it functions as we’d be keeping the specific button depressed, and we can progress in the wanted direction with small steps. This feature improves usability a lot.
Basic functions
The phonebook doesn’t bring about major changes; the internal capacity is 1000 names. In the list we can see the contents of the SIM and the device memory at the same time. There is nothing extra; the phonebook knows everything we would expect from this category. An entry can have more than one phone number, an email address, ringtone, picture and note assigned to it; the possibility of entering birth date is not present. We can copy names from/to the SIM card, they can be sent as a contact card through Bluetooth and they can also be printed using the same method.
There is nothing extra about messaging either. We can store 500 text messages; that should be enough for a time. Email and multimedia messages are stored in the phones’ internal memory. Emails can have attachments, and U900 can display Office documents and PDF files. There are no problems with text entry, the keys are working fine and there is T9 to help us if we need it. U900 keeps a list of the latest addressees, so usually we don’t have to search the phonebook.
The applications are also worth checking out, as we can see some new ones over here: at last here is an RSS reader, which has been a preferred app on Sony Ericsson phones for a long time. The calendar is nothing special; it can have five types of events: meeting, anniversary, holiday, important and personal. As for the number of entries we can store, there is a limit of 100, 50-20 and 20-20 in the same order as listed above. The usual alarm clock, calculator (basic functions, but supports parentheses), world clock (unfortunately without a map), stopwatch with lap timing, countdown timer and the unit converter are all here.
Multimedia
It’s time for the 5 megapixel autofocus camera; let’s see what it can do! Even if it’s not as good as G600, but it still makes pretty good pictures – if lighting conditions are ideal. The first cloud might disturb the software and photos get noisy pretty easily, but at least they remain rich in details. The box has a large label showing that there is a “Power LED” on the phone, as a replacement of a flash, and this turns out to be true. If the subject of the photo is too close, then there is so much “power”, that the picture will be completely overexposed, but if we’d like to target further than three meters, than the whole thing disperses without a trace. The camera is to be used in landscape mode, exposure is exceptionally fast. The menu we can access is on top of the screen, and has the usual settings like ISO level, environmental theme, picture quality, self timer and picture stabilizer.
Video recording is available at a “rocking” 15 fps at 320 x 240 pixels resolution. This will just about do, but we have seen better than this, the camera in U900 would be capable of more. There is the eternal question of how fast does the phone display the photos growing up to 2 MB in size. The answer: acceptable. It’s no flash, but just until you reach the last file in the list, the index picture is displayed. I won’t say anything else; let’s see the loads of test pictures:
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In terms of music U900 doesn’t perform as well as I’ve expected. On one hand the speaker over the front cover is really weak, even more if there is bass in the music. No wonder there are only squeaking noises in the list of included ringtones. Still, the phone can ring and vibrate at the same time; the time might be close when this will be a characteristic of most new Samsung devices. The problem is that the volume is too low even if we’re just making a simple phone call; deciphering the sentences is harder than usual in a noisy environment.
Unfortunately the included headset cannot be taken apart, so we have to obtain a separate converter if we’re not content with the medium quality of the basic headset. Still, we might need it for the built-in, RDS-enabled radio. This one has quite a simple interface, but it wouldn’t need anything better, but the MP3 player has some nice graphics and finally there is an animated real-time spectrum analyzer, but we can also see the album art. There is no equalizer, but we can rate and rank the tracks with stars, if someone has a passion for it. The player can run in the background, and then in the bottom row of the standby screen we can see the current situation and the OLED touchpad turns into the surface needed to control the music player.
Data transfer, battery
We have to mention by all means that U900 is one of the first cell phone that support 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA data transfer besides the usual GPRS, EDGE and UMTS networks. There is an HTML browser, which can break pages by width, but landscape view is still missing from the list of features.
At a local level both USB and Bluetooth are supported at version 2.0. The latter one in stereo. The phone ships with Samsung PC Studio 3.2 on the CD, but it didn’t impress me at all. First I was missing the possibility of downloading themes from the phone or editing them on the PC, but we should be happy that they exist anyway. But the fact that the software takes more than 30 minutes to copy 20 pictures to the PC… is an extremely poor performance, even if we’re talking about 40 megs. I am giving a bonus point though, as the software writes quite fast to the memory (it copied a photo in less than 2 seconds), the 2 GB microSD card used for the test caused no problems.
The battery is another weak spot, as I think the display of the three-step indicator has been programmed by a sadist. It has been at level two in the morning when I went off to work, then it set itself to power saving mode in the noon (I know as I wanted to take pictures of some people that gathered at a building fire) and so no multimedia features were available, but it asks for a charger every 10 minutes, when it lights up both the display and the touchpad, hoping that even that remaining amount of energy runs short.
Summary? The phone is beautiful, the touchpad is extravagant, Soul’s marketing is powerful. A couple of thousand will be sold, that’s sure. But U900 is not good enough to take the reputation of non-operating system Samsung phones on its own. Lots of annoying little problems, lots of small things that could have been changed with a little care. These ruin the overall picture, although Soul could really have been a handset that has a soul. Of course we still award it, but only with this:
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| Samsung U900 |
By Szaszati
Samsung U900 Soult has been provided by XXL GSM. The device can be bought at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Samsung U900 Soul | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS | |
| Size | 105 x 49.5 x 12.9 mm | |
| Weight | 112 grams | |
| Available colors | silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 16 million | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 entries | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 295 KB | |
| Internal memory | 100 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present (384 kbps) / 7.2 Mbit/s | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 (custom Samsung connector) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra functions | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice calling / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung BlackUI II | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | none included | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | - | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus, flash | |
| Secondary camera | present, VGA resolution | |
| Video recording | present (H.264 format, QVGA, 15fps) | |
| Music player | present, runs in background | |
| Equalizer | none | |
| FM radio | present, with RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 880 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 250 hours | |
| Talk time | 280 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| Image Editor, OLED touchpad, UCS | ||
