Performance
As a portable music player, the F400 falls short of competing with the likes of dedicated players from Apple, Creative and Sony. Compared to music phones, both the iPhone 3G and Motorola Rokr E8 offer dedicated 3.5mm headphone sockets and the former certainly offers greater audio quality.
One thing we noticed is a not-too-subtle distortion with bass. During Ingrid Michaelson's beautiful track Masochist, there was a distinct distortion, or 'rattle', that accompanied the bass-heavy kick drum.
We compared the F400's sound quality with the iPod classic's, with the same lossless-encoded tracks, and through the same studio-grade reference headphones, and felt the F400 was definitely the weaker performer. The classic offered a slightly cleaner sound and an improved sense of spaciousness.
Normally we wouldn't compare a music phone to a £250 dedicated music device, but the F400 is pitched as offering "breathtaking sound quality" and features audio by Bang and Olufsen, so we felt it necessary to give it a real run for its money.
We genuinely believe most people will be more than happy with its performance however, and indeed most sub-£60 earphones aren't good enough to convey the F400's shortcomings anyway.
Though while the phone is generally easy enough to use, we never particularly enjoyed it -- certain oversights reek of unfinished software design. For example, there doesn't seem to be any easy way of browsing your music library without stopping the song currently playing.
Finally, call quality is certainly above average, but has a slightly dull tone -- clearer call experiences do exist.
Conclusion
The F400 excited us so much before we got
to test it, but let us down once we started. It's still a good phone on
the whole, but it feels at times almost unfinished, with occasionally
annoying usability and no features that stand out from the crowd. And
it's certainly no competition to dedicated MP3 players.
The Motorola Rokr E8 and Samsung F400 gave us similarly mixed feelings, but the Motorola has the edge as a music phone. The F400, on the other hand, has a better, flash-equipped camera, a friendlier design and improved usability in terms of texting and navigation.
Care about music in particular but nothing else that much? Choose the E8. Like music and usability equally? Choose the F400. You should also consider the Sony Ericsson W760i, an excellent phone despite its lack of a 3.5mm headphone socket.
Edited by Nick Hide
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