Samsung E840 review

Samsung E840 Review

Reviewed by: Patrick Wignall

Reviewed on: 23 August 2007

Other neat extras include a document viewer that lets you load up Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files from your memory card to view them on the screen.

Call quality is also very good with crisp and clear sound. And although the speaker phone is not quite as loud as on some other mobiles we've used, it's still more than good enough to hold a decent conversation when there's a bit of background noise around.

Weaknesses
To keep the phone as slim as possible Samsung has had to use a smaller than usual battery -- as a result the battery life is worse than you would normally expect on this class of handset. You'll get around four and a half hours of talk time out of it, which is an hour or two short of what most mobiles in its class can achieve.

Another issue is the lack of 3G support. It means that surfing the Web via the decent built-in browser can feel sluggish.

The 2-megapixel camera isn't exactly state of the art, either. The shots it takes have good colour but as the resolution is relatively low they don't capture a lot of detail. As there's no flash, results are also poor when it's taking shots in low light. Still, Samsung offers the 5-megapixel G600 for those who are really after a serious camera phone.

Some people may take a while to get used to the touch buttons on the front of the phone because they don't provide the tactile feedback you get from real keys. There's also sometimes a slight lag between pressing the buttons and the phone responding.

Conclusion
There's no doubting that the E840 is a great looking handset. The slim design and glossy finish as well as the large, bright screen make it a real head turner. It also has some surprising features such as the onboard document viewer. It's just a shame that the battery life is below par and that it doesn't support 3G.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday