Samsung Blade S5600v Review

Samsung have been busy recently, releasing many phones into all areas of the market. Smartphones, mid-range phones, low user devices, handsets aimed at prepay users, young users and a really nice range of touchscreen devices. The Samsung S5600v Blade comes in the latter category. Along with the Samsung Jet, the Samsung Blade leads the way in the new level of mobile phones that interface via a touchscreen. Just how popular these devices prove over time is debatable; there are still a significant number of people who prefer to enter data on a device using a traditional alphanumeric keypad, and to a lesser extent, a hard QWERTY keyboard.

Touchscreen devices do have some advantages, though, and chief of these is the size of the screen. Kind of obvious, really, but once the keyboard has been removed it leaves a lot of real estate for the screen to fill, without compromising the overall size of the handset. The screen on the Blade is a nice, crisp clear 16 million colour TFT display, measuring 2.8 inches. This is the sort of screen that you want for watching video clips on a phone. It is about the minimum comfortable size that would allow for watching a full length movie without suffering too much eye strain. It isn’t possible to watch XviD or DivX videos on the Blade, but there is a lot of content mobile optimised to the MPEG4 standard, which is generic to mobile phones, plus the Blade can also take WMV video files, which is a nice bonus.

The media player on the Blade is very capable. As well as supporting the aforementioned video files, a whole range of digital music files can be played back on the handset too. Memory storage on the handset is a bit meagre, in modern terms, at just 50MB, but thankfully this can be expanded up to 8GB with the addition of a Micro SD memory card. Plenty of room for your music, and video clips, and images, too. The Samsung Blade is a capable imaging device, certainly nothing too outstanding but it will get the job done and is acceptable enough for a mobile phone. A 3.2 Megapixel camera, the Blade has an LED flash, autofocus and smile detection. It is also possible to record video clips, QVGA resolution at 15fps. Nothing special, again, but adequate enough for loading up to YouTube of Flickr.

Uploads on the move with the Blade are easily catered for, with the device supporting HSDPA Mobile Broadband, up to 7.2 Mbps speeds are available. If you happen to be out of 3G range then you will have to rely on GPRS or EDGE, as the Blade does not include WiFi connectivity.

So, overall the Samsung S5600v Blade is a smart enough device, looks good, measures in at a nice size, just 12.9mm thick, and weighs in at a more than acceptable 92g. Available in both pink and black, the Blade has some nice extra features included. These include a stereo FM radio, with RDS support, and the inclusion of Bluetooth 2.1 for wireless stereo connectivity. Bluetooth 2.1 is the latest version of Bluetooth technology, which allows for easier pairing to other compatible Bluetooth products. Another nice application is the Shazam Find Music Service. This will operate in a similar way to the Sony Ericsson Track ID program, allowing you to discover the name of a music track, the artist and album it comes from just by recording a small snippet of the song and uploading it to the Shazam service. Shazam has offered a service like this for a while now, where you could dial a shortcode number and record the song through the phone’s microphone, so it is nice to see it evolve into a full on mobile phone application.

So, in conclusion, the Samsung Blade is a competent, solid performer, with a nice range of features that should appeal to a wide variety of users. There is nothing outstanding, but it shouldn’t disappoint those who buy it.