Samsung i300 review

Features
Samsung has peppered the i300 with some clever hardware and software features that augment its basic Windows Mobile smart phone capabilities of catering for your telephony, email, messaging, calendar, contact management and to-do listing needs.

The best hardware feature is the way the navigation button doubles as a scroll wheel. It has a small raised section that helps you spin it right round (like a record) to achieve this.

When you are viewing the list of software on the i300 you can use it to scroll through, with its central button available for making selections. When you are using the 1.3-megapixel camera spinning the wheel activates the digital zoom; when in the media player it adjusts the volume.

There's a strip along the bottom edge of the Today screen, just above the softmenus, which you can scroll through by spinning the navigation button to quickly get to incoming texts and MMS messages, your diary dates and the software you've been using recently. You can even jump right to browsing the contents of the 3GB hard drive or a MicroSD card -- handy, for example, to quickly get to a tune you want to play.

On the software side, if you are a fan of voice control, you'll like the i300's built-in utility. It can run software as well as dial contacts, and it doesn't need any training. And if you're desperate to use that hard drive to carry large documents from one place to the next, then the Picsel viewer will be useful for reading them on the i300. Among the formats it can cope with are Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and PDF.

Both the i300's box and O2's Web site stress the potential of this handset for music playing. Certainly getting tunes onto the hard drive is easy. You can copy and paste them, or, if you run Windows Media Player 10 on your PC, you can synchronise.

Sound quality is passable, but not brilliant. If you are used to a good portable music player you may find the audio under par through the provided headphones, though you can improve it significantly if you opt to use the adaptor Samsung provides for your own favourite set. We were more comfortable listening to music through the stereo speakers on the hardware itself. This is more of a background activity than using a headset, so we were less demanding in terms of quality.

The SRS WOW feature, which you can access via Samsung's media player (but not through Windows Media Player), gives you some equaliser functions that make a discernable difference to the tone of playback, so that you can tweak it till it best meets your needs.

Performance
When it comes to making voice calls, the Samsung i300 performed perfectly well, with good audio volume and signal retention. We love the fact that you can turn the GSM radio off using a side button -- it is so much easier than the usual Windows Mobile system of pressing the power button then choosing to drop into flight mode when you want to be call-free.

To compensate for its power-sucking hard drive, the i300 comes with this extended-life battery, which gives the handset an unsightly beer belly

You get two batteries, a fat extended-life one (which makes the back of the casing bulge like a beer belly) and a standard-life one that gives a streamlined finish to the back of the casing. We played music from a MicroSD card for nearly nine hours using the extended battery and five hours on standard. We played from a card because the hard drive is turned off quite a while before the batteries die, making it impossible to access music -- or anything else -- stored on it, but the card remains accessible till the battery is depleted.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide