Samsung C3510 Genoa Review

Samsung are showing the love to low end prepay users with the launch of the Samsung C3510 Genoa. The C3510 is squarely aimed at the youth market, for young people moving onto their first prepay phone. Part of the colourful Corby/Genio range (The Corby Moniker is an abbreviation of Colour By, as in Colour By Samsung) the C3510 comes with a few surprising features as Samsung look to distinguish themselves from other manufacturers in the cut-throat budget prepay market.

The C3510 Genoa has a familiar look, in line with many other recent Genio devices; kind of oval in shape, with a smooth, rounded look, the C3510 has a 2.8 inch TFT touchscreen, with a resolution of 240 x 320, which supports up to 256,000 colours. It is a measure of the way the industry has progressed in recent months, that a ‘low end’ device ships with a 2.8 inch display; 18 months ago such large screens were the preserve of mighty smartphones like the Nokia N95 8GB. A nice touch on the C3510 is the inclusion of the Samsung Smart Unlock feature. This allows for the phone to be both unlocked and a pre-determined menu item or application opened, just by tracing a letter on the screen.

The C3510 is compact and lightweight, measuring 104 x 55 x 13mm, and weighing little more than 92g. An ideal device to have around as a ‘going out phone’, the handset has some nice options including a 3.5mm audio jack for using your own headset, plus the Genoa supports DNSe (Digital Natural Sound Engine) for excellent music audio quality. There isn’t a great deal of internal memory on the device, just 30MB, which is to be expected on a handset in this price range, but there is a memory card slot allowing the capacity to be expanded up to 8GB with the addition of a MicroSD Memory Card, offering ample storage for hundreds of music tracks. Multiple file formats are supported, including MP3, WMA and AAC, plus the media player can also play MP4, H.263 and H.264 video files. In addition the C3510 offers an inclusive Stereo FM Radio with RDS support, as well as an FM recorder, which allows you to record straight to the handset from the radio.

To give the phone further credibility with the youth market, the C3510 Genoa is a capable messaging device, with tight integration for the popular social networking sites, with live updates sent to the device. So far so good, the C3510 is shaping up to be a really decent handset, but keeping in mind the low entry price point it is only natural to look at where the cost savings have been made, and with the C3510 this is in the imaging capabilities and connectivity. The C3510 does have an integrated 1.3 Megapixel digital camera, however image quality isn’t great. Fine as a point n shoot camera, or for sending as MMS, but little more than that. The camera is capable of recording video, QCIF resolution at 15fps. Hardly YouTube quality, but again, for recording clips and sending via MMS it gets the job done.

The connectivity options for data are restricted to Class 10 GPRS and EDGE; there is neither HSDPA nor 3G here. Bluetooth 2.1 is included, and this also supports A2DP for stereo Bluetooth transmission, which is a welcome bonus.

As Samsung battle for market share, it is the success of handsets like the C3510 that will see them raise their status towards number one, rather than the headline grabbing smartphones. The Genoa C3510 is well set with a competent range of features, and is set to be popular among a wide range of consumers when it launches, which is expected to be during Q1 2010.