Samsung i320 review

The standard on-board Windows Mobile software is augmented by Samsung with a few very useful extras. For example, Samsung has a couple of nice Today screen overlays you can use to view upcoming appointments, tasks and messages, and switch into applications. One of these is so large it takes up much of the screen, the other is a single line on the bottom of the screen you move through using the navigation pad.

There's a little application called D-Day you can use to act as a count down to important days in your life, an alarm tool that caters for five different alarms, a unit converter, a stopwatch and an equaliser for the built-in speaker called WOW XT.

You also get the Picsel viewer which lets you read Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, as well as PDFs, text files and a range of image formats.

The wide screen really helps here. Samsung has taken a standard 240x320-pixel screen and flipped it onto its side. This is a stroke of genius if you are into reading texts on your smart phone because it gives you a wider view.

There is 120MB of shared memory on board, and if you need to augment what is available, for example if you want to carry plenty of music around, you can add more. This is achieved with microSD cards, but annoyingly Samsung has put the slot under the battery cover. You have to take the battery out and power down to get to it.

An important consequence of the small size of the i320 is that there is only room for a tiny battery. This makes for a somewhat short battery life as we report below, but Samsung provides a second cell and a charger so at least you can prepare a fully charged spare battery to pop into the slot when needed.

Performance
So let's get to battery life first. Forcing the screen to stay on and playing music from a microSD card, we got five hours of music, which is actually better than we'd expected. With two fully charged cells on hand we reckon you could get away with a weekend away and no power charger.

The camera delivered fairly sharp images but its colour reproduction wasn't all it could have been. As long as you don't have especially high expectations of it, and particularly when using it indoors, then it should serve you well enough.

Thanks to Expansys for providing a review sample of this phone.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield