Samsung S7350 Ultra Classico Review

When describing a mobile phone, words like solid, reliable, dependable, are rarely enough to generate excitement in a device. Whilst they are commendable qualities, they don’t shout ‘Wow!’ But, those very words one would use when describing a handset like the Samsung S7350 Ultra Classico. When Samsung initially launched the Ultra range, the innovative design of slim handsets and quality materials was still pretty rare on the market. Nowadays most handsets have slim measurements, and use quality materials or cheaper materials with a quality look in their manufacture. But, sticking with the tried and tested formula of success, the S7350 retains a smooth, stylish brushed effect, and has a nice solid feel in the hand. For a handset of its size, 110g and a fairly compact 109 x 50 x 12.6mm, the screen dominates. A comfortable 2.6 inches, adequate for video playback without causing too much eye strain, the TFT display has a pixel resolution of 240 x 400 and will support up to 16 million colours, offering a rich image presentation, and should be fine even in the most testing of bright sunlight.

The S7350 is not a touchscreen device, but part of me feels that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there are a wide variety of touch devices on the market right now, with not many of those coming from Samsung themselves. Quality and style should not be reserved just for the touchscreen market, especially as the impression is that people are still more comfortable using a device that has a traditional alphanumeric keypad.

Navigating the menu on the S7350 Ultra is a breeze, and will be familiar to many long term Samsung users. Flash based, offering nice graphic animation, the menu has a customisation option, where you can ‘pin’ your most used applications in place on the custom menu screen, to save you hunting through the menu structure to launch the feature. The standard background screen is also familiar Samsung, with a standard wallpaper display image based on the country you are in, and the display is also controlled in some way by the clock. So, during the day you will see a bright daytime image, where occasionally the birds will fly across the screen, as the clouds float by, but at night time this changes, as the display shows a night time version of the image.

The Ultra Classico has a lot to keep you entertained; the media player is well presented, and supports most popular music files. When entering the music player the music files stored in the device can be navigated via Artist, Album, Genre, etc, and you can also create your own playlists. The video player is excellent, too, allowing for playback of WMV and MPEG4 videos as well as DivX and XviD. For a standard mid range handset that offers no multimedia pretensions, this is very good indeed. With internal memory capacity of 100MB which can be expanded by up to 16GB with a MicroSD memory card, there is more than enough room for a couple of movies, a few music albums and hundreds of photos.

Speaking of photos, the Samsung S7350 incorporates a 5.0 Megapixel camera, with autofocus and LED flash. The camera has face detection support along with smile shot, image stabilisation and Wide Dynamic Range, which helps with providing clear images even when there are a variety of light conditions at play, i.e. in a shot where there are both dark and bright areas, Wide Dynamic Range ensures the darker areas are not too dark, whilst the brighter areas are not saturated. Thanks to the inclusion of a GPS receiver, the camera can also add Geotags to the images, capturing location information with the image. The camera is also capable of high quality video recording, up to 720 x 480 pixels at 30 fps, with an option for slow motion video recording, too.

The Classico is well supported in terms of connectivity – here we find all the usual suspects, such as 3G with HSDPA mobile broadband support, alongside GPRS and EDGE for non 3G coverage. The device is quad band GSM, offering excellent global coverage, and we also find Samsung have included Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support. The only real omission here is the lack of WiFi.

The Samsung S7350 Ultra Classico is a solid, reliable, dependable phone. But underneath it all, surprisingly, we find a high quality phone packed with many features that actually put to shame some higher end multimedia devices.

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