Samsung Z560 review

The Samsung Z560 is a humble phone. On the outside it looks like a standard clamshell phone but on the inside beats the heart of a high-speed Internet racer. It features HSDPA, which can also be found in the HTC TyTN, and lets you access the Internet at speeds of up to 1.8Mbps.

The Z650 is currently available at T-Mobile on a monthly contract from free to about £140, depending on which tariff you choose.

Design
The first thing you notice when you pick up the Z560 is that it's not that large or that heavy for an HSDPA (3.5G) phone -- it's the smallest we've seen so far and at 94g, weighs less than some basic handsets.

On the front section there's a 2-megapixel camera at the top, a small colour screen further down and three dedicated music touch keys at the bottom. On the left side of the handset is a charging port that also doubles up as the headphone port.

On the right side of the Z560 there's a dedicated camera button and a covered expandable microSD slot. The back section is minimalist with a sliding plastic cover to access the battery.

Once you open the up the clamshell you immediately notice the large colour screen that measures an impressive 35mm by 47mm and displays 256,000 colours. Underneath it, on the bottom right, is an unobtrusive small VGA camera for video calling.

Further down on the bottom section, on the inside, is the keypad. It's large, well paced out and the keys are easy to press. Indeed, this is one of the best keypads we've ever used and makes dialling and texting an uncomplicated task.

Features
Our Z560 came from T-Mobile on the Web 'n' Walk tariff meaning that we could access the Internet as much as we liked for a flat-rate fee, This is where this phone showed its true power -- via an HSDPA connection you can download Web content at up to speeds of 1.8Mbps, which is similar to some people's home broadband connection.

In order to access the Internet, one of the soft keys on the top of the keypad lets you access T-Mobile's Web 'n' Walk homepage directly. This gives you the option to search Google or access a variety of useful mobile specific pages.

One such page is the BBC's News homepage, which displays pictures and summaries of the day's news. The page loads within seconds and is truly impressive if you're a veteran mobile Internet browser used to GPRS speeds.

The built-in browser lets you set it to desktop view so you can view pages as you would on a computer by scrolling across the whole page. Or you can set it to smart-fit view, which squashes the whole page to the size of the Z560's display, although this makes sites appear incorrectly if they're not designed to be viewed on small screens.

That's one problem with browsing on the Z560: some pages not designed to be displayed on a mobile phone take a long time to load or won't display at all. Fortunately, there are two solutions to this problem.