Samsung E570 review

With its lipstick colour scheme, built-in pedometer and calorie counter the Samsung E570 couldn't be more girly if it was curled up on a sofa with only a box of chocolates and Sex in the City on the TV for company.

If a girly girl's handset is your kind of thing then you can pick it up for free on contract or for around £70 on pay as you go.

Strengths
The dinky E570 is definitely a cute and stylish looking phone. Its curved body, lipstick-coloured scheme and floral pattern on the rear guarantees that it makes a bold fashion statement. The phone is also very small and light so it slips easily into a pocket or handbag.

The menu system is presented as a pretty standard grid of icons, so it's easy to find your way around the key features. Thanks to the surprisingly large buttons on the keypad and the easy-to-use T9 predictive text system, you can work up a decent texting speed.

Samsung has also added a number of female friendly features most of which are found tucked away in the 'Women's Life' menu. Here you'll find stuff like a biorhythm graph, calories counter and electronic shopping list. There's also a pedometer that you can use to count the number of steps you take each day and work out how active a lifestyle you're leading.

The screen isn't the largest or sharpest that we've seen, but it is very bright and produces really vibrant colours. It shows a decent amount of text so you don't have to do lots of scrolling when reading longer text messages.

When it comes to call quality the handset can't be faulted and the speakerphone mode works well. You also get Bluetooth for using it with a headset or car kit. The battery life isn't half bad either. It'll give you around six hours of talk time and will keep running on standby for over 10 days.

Weaknesses
The E570 includes a music player, but unfortunately it's very basic. For example, it doesn't let you search for tracks by the usual artist, album and song title categories, but instead just presents you with a long list of all the music files stored on your phone. It's a shame because the sound quality from the supplied headphones is actually rather good.

The handset only has 40MB of memory so if you really do want to make use of the music player you'll have to purchase a microSD card for storing your tunes, as Samsung doesn't supply one with the phone.

The built-in camera is also rather limited. It has a relatively low 1.3-megapixel resolution, doesn't have a micro mirror for self portraits and lacks a flash for shooting in low light. It does a good job of capturing fairly natural looking colours, but if you try printing out the photos as normal sized snaps you'll find they look pixelated.

Also, although the phone can be connected to a PC via USB, Samsung hasn't included a USB lead in the box and as the phone has a non-standard connector you can't just use a standard mini USB lead.

Conclusion
The E570 isn't the most advanced handset in the world and the camera is certainly nothing to write home about. However, it does pack in some interesting features like the pedometer and calories counter, and has impressive battery life. If you're after a stylish girly phone, it's a safe bet.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Jon Squire