Times are difficult these days, and for many people, cutting back on expensive luxuries is becoming a necessity and better budgeting is a must. For buyers on a budget who still like to buy nice looking equipment, Samsung have announced the S5600 and the S5230 Tocco Lite. The S5600 Aimed at the already over crowded mid range market, the S5600 is a fully equipped touchscreen phone equipped with an adequate camera and well disposed for those who like a bit of swish for their money.
It looks basic, but that is not actually a criticism. The whole minimalistic approach to the design adds to its charm, and fits in with the overall feel of the phone. Underneath the large, 2.8 inch screen sit the send/end call keys and a standard navigational D-Pad. The large screen is a capacitive touchscreen, 240 x 320 pixels, supporting up to 16 million colours. Overall the device is very compact, less than 13mm thick, and weighing in at a very pocket friendly 92g.
As with the handsets bigger brother the Samsung Tocco, the handset runs on the intuitive TouchWiz interface, which is now updated and includes some extra widget options. Using TouchWiz Widgets, the standby screen on the handset can be customised to your own requirements, simply by dragging widgets onto the main display from the side navigation bar. An interesting addition to the whole widget system is the inclusion of gesture lock. This should allow you simultaneously drag a widget onto the screen and open the application in the same movement as unlocking the device. A neat idea, let’s hope it works as well in practice as it suggests in theory.
Imaging is catered for with the inclusion of a 3.2 megapixel camera. The camera appears to be fixed focus, but does offer smile detection. Equipped with an LED flash, it is also able to add Geotagging information to captured images thanks to the inclusion of a built in GPS receiver. As well as offering GPS, the handset has aGPS support, which helps get a quicker fix on your location. There is nothing worse than having to wait for the GPS network to get a lock on when you want to take a picture. The camera is enabled for video recording, capturing video clips at up to 15 fps.
As well as offering a stereo FM radio, the handset includes a fully featured media player. Music wise there is support for a whole host of digital music formats, and the layout of the music player is well designed. Music tracks can be filtered by genre, artist, album and composer. Standard automatic playlists are included, as well as the option to create custom playlists of your own. The music player has its own widget, so music can be controlled with one touch from the main standby screen, as well as through the standard application. Another nice touch is the inclusion of the Shazam Find Music application, which works in much the same way as Track ID on the Sony Ericsson. Simply start the application, hold the device microphone close to a speaker and a small snippet of song is recorded, and then sent to the Shazam service via the internet. Within seconds a message is returned to your handset detailing the name of the song, artist, and album.
As for the technical specification, the S5600 is well featured. Firstly, onboard memory capacity on the device is a healthy 80MB. This can easily be expanded with the addition of a Micro SD card, with the device supporting up to 16GB. Unfortunately, Hot Swap is not available – the memory card slot is underneath the battery, so the phone needs to be turned off to access the memory card. Full 3G support is available, with HSDPA Mobile Broadband included, offering data transfer speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps on compatible networks. Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity is also included, along with a Micro USB port, for charging, connecting the data cable and also the headset, so unfortunately there is no 3.5mm audio access point.
Overall the Samsung S5600 is a solid mid range phone, with enough features and functionality to please most all users. It seems this phone fits the category of a device that does not need to be well marketed to find it selling in high numbers. Release date, expected June 2009.
Related Samsung S5600 Links
- Compare the latest Samsung S5600 deals
- Compare Samsung S5600 pay as you go prices
- Read user Samsung S5600 reviews
- Full list of Samsung S5600 specs
- View gallery of Samsung S5600 pictures
- Watch latest Samsung S5600 video
Twitter
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Mixx
Delicious
Technorati
10:38 pm
This phone is absolutely brilliant, I asked for a Tocco lite for xmas. But when I saw this phone it had to be the one. My dad had bought it and was looking at it with my mum and I wasnt allowed to touch it. I went on the internet and read to find as much as I could on this phone. I will be looking forward to having it for Christmas. Overall this is the most attractive phone I have seen for a long time.
9:12 pm
Is there any way that I can get my own things to put in to the side bar to drag to my homepge, etc check my usage, is there any way I can put that into the wide selection of apps on the home page?