The Samsung F490 follows a trend that we welcome - touch-based user interface and a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. Add a widescreen 3.2" TFT display and a slim profile, and it already sounds like a juicy deal. We've already reviewed the Samsung Armani phone - that was based on the same Touch UI. However the Samsung F490 seems like the most mature Touch product of them all avoiding most of the mishaps of the previous products. So, buckle up as we test drive this baby in the GSMArena fast lane.

Samsung F490 resembles Samsung F700 but it lacks the hardware QWERTY keypad of its sibling. Just by looking at it, our guess is it's obviously aiming to put pressure on the LG Viewty, that is already available and gathering momentum. We'll see about that later on with an impromptu feature comparison.

Stylish looks and high-quality build

Slim 11.8mm profile

Tri-band GSM and HSDPA network support with video calls

Large 3.3-inch touchscreen TFT display with 240 x 432 pixel resolution (16:9 screen ratio)

5 megapixel autofocus camera

Vibrating haptic response

microSD memory card slot

Stereo Bluetooth

Standard 3.5mm audio jack

Office documents viewer

Snappy user interface

Intuitive music player

Awkward and slow web browser scrolling and panning

Video recording maxes out at QVGA@15fps

Unable to play widescreen user-encoded WMV and H.263 videos

Slow image zooming in the gallery

The three fullscreen Java games are trial versions only

Just for the record, we won't be putting the "iPhone-killer" load on Samsung F490's shoulders. Never mind such a comparison seems to force itself into being every time a new full touchscreen handset gets released. The secret behind the iPhone success is not the "touchability" itself, but the fluid, almost physical reaction of the user interface to your fingers. That, along with the exceptional web browsing capabilities that no other portable device on the market is yet able to rival, makes it unique.

Still, while the iPhone has revolutionary user interface and web browsing, it's crippled in a "What were they thinking?" way in quite a number of other essentials. So just to sum up, the iPhone is a class in its own and it can't be challenged by any of the touch-enabled devices that we currently know of.

Anyway, while not exactly an "iPhone-killer", the Samsung F490 is a fascinating device, too. The glossy surface, the rounded edges, and the 11.8mm thin body - it's all there and it's all so inviting. Probably a future fashion-icon, the Samsung F490 looks like the crown piece of the Samsung lineup. We are yet to see about that, so catch up after this short jump.

The Samsung F490 is really refined and leaves a great impression. While the glossy surface is a sure fingerprint magnet, Samsung have done a great job of making the handset look its high-roller price tag (around EUR 530).

The Samsung F490 measures 115 x 53.5 x 11.8 mm and weighs 102 g. While it's certainly taller than usual, it strikes you as a compact handset - mainly due to the slim profile.

The front panel is dominated by the large 3.2" 262K-color TFT display with the unusual resolution of 240 x 432 pixels (by the way, in landscape mode that's pure 16:9 aspect ratio). Unlike the Samsung F700, with the F490 you can calibrate the display to achieve the best performance. As it turned out, calibrating is best done with a sharp object such as a pen, pencil or stylus.

Above the display are the earpiece and the video call camera. Video calls are possible thanks to the UMTS/HSDPA 3.6 Mbps support. Speaking of connectivity, the other wireless option in Samsung F490 is Bluetooth 2.0.

Below the display there are three touch-sensitive keys. Both the display and the keys react to touch by any object - not just your finger. The three keys below the display are a green and red receiver, and a Home screen key that always takes you to the main menu.

On the right side we see a rather interesting hardware slider key. Sliding it up and holding it for a few seconds turns the handset on or off. Pushing it down locks the touch input so to avoid incidental presses in your pocket. The Samsung F700 had a similar hardware lock key but it had nothing to do with powering the phone up and down.

Beside the hardware slider, there's also a shortcut key that takes you to the Croix shortcuts. Another button starts the camera and serves as a shutter key.

On the left side there's a volume rocker and the universal connectivity port that is of the new type Samsung are lately implementing in their handsets. Older accessories won't do.

On the top of the Samsung F490 there is a 3.5mm jack, much like the Samsung F700. This is a welcome feature for all music fans that have their pair of good music headphones.

On the back of the Samsung F490 you will only notice the 5 megapixel camera module along with a self-portrait mirror and a LED flash (no xenon here).

Removing the back panel is a piece of cake. The SIM bed and the memory card slot are right next to the battery. The microSD memory card slot is fully hot-swappable and, funnily, you can remove the SIM too without taking out the battery. It's a good thing that Samsung F490 is fully operational even without a SIM card inserted - a true rarity in the Samsung mobile phone portfolio.

The Samsung F490 is equipped with a Li-Ion battery with a capacity of 880 mAh. It's quoted at up to 220 hours of standby time and up to 6 hours of talk time. Unfortunately, we can't comment on the real-life battery performance.

The Samsung F490 feels good in hand and frankly, all the controls around the handset body are convenient enough to ensure a pleasant and user-friendly handling.

We've already reviewed the Samsung award-winning Croix user interface in our Samsung Armani phone review (the Samsung F700 was first to come with it). The Armani phone however proved way underpowered for the rich graphical experience the user interface is trying to deliver with real time transitions and animations. The Samsung F700 has hardware as capable as the one of F490 and it offers seamless execution of every possible task.

The Samsung F490 however has received some software upgrades and thus combines the best of the F700 and the Armani phone.

Every touch on the display is accompanied by a slight vibration - just so you know that your command has been accepted. That's a feature we would love to have on the iPhone. The level of the vibrating feedback is adjustable within a scale of 1 to 5.

On the main standby screen there are three functional areas - a clock/calendar bar at the bottom, a crosshairs in the center and a shortcut bar on the top.

A finger sweep on the Calendar bar at the bottom changes the view to the current time only. If you have setup the world clock, it will show two time zones simultaneously. When the music player is running, the currently playing track is shown on this bar, along with the album art if there is one.

The whole Calendar/Clock band toggles on and off if you click on the lowest clock bar at the bottom.

Unlike the Armani phone, a double tap on the Calendar opens the actual calendar applications, while a double tap on the clock displays the World time application (it's the way the F700 operates too).

Again, unlike the Armani phone, a tap on the crosshairs in the middle of the screen opens the main menu, otherwise accessible through its touch-sensitive key below the display.

The wallpaper of the F490 can change as the user wishes - that's a normal feature of any modern phone. However the F490 offers it with a twist. If you wish, you can set the handset to rotate several of your favorite wallpapers at an interval you define. You even have the say on things like the transition effect used and the order the images will be displayed.

The top shortcut bar in standby mode features three shortcuts. The first one activates the Silent mode after a touch-and-hold, the second one opens the phonebook and, finally, the third launches the Phone dialer.

We complained about the Armani phone specially styled icons that were hard as hell to recognize unless you activate them. The icons used by the F490 are far more understandable and intuitively designed.

The main menu displays as a 4 x 3 grid of icons. There are no alternative color versions. Sub-menus are shown as lists. Funny enough, all sub-menus have a numerical shortcut, which of course cannot be used in the case of the F490 - an obvious legacy of the F700, which has a hardware QWERTY keyboard.

Scrolling within the listed menus is intuitive enough, as all it takes is several finger swipes. However it's nowhere near the iPhone handling. Furthermore, the tall body of the F490 might turn out to be a scrolling nightmare for users with shorter thumbs (read: most women).

The special cross-like shortcuts menu is still available, just like on the Armani phone and the F700, but it has received its own shortcut key on the right hand side of the handset. From this menu you can open the music player, phone dialer, message editor and web browser. Touching the center opens the main menu.

To dial a number, you need to use the fullscreen Phone dialer. Unlike some of the other Samsung handsets we've reviewed recently, the Samsung F490 doesn't suggest contacts, whose numbers contain the digits you have typed.

The phonebook of Samsung F490 offers space for 1000 entries. The row on the bottom of the contact list gives you access to frequently used features. To search the phonebook you need to tap on the search field, which opens the alphanumeric keypad and then type the first letters of a contact's name.

From the Options menu you get access to editing the contacts. A total of 10 fields are available for each entry. Furthermore, you can repeat each field more than once, which allows you to add up to 5 numbers per contact.

The Calls Log gives you control over your recent calls. It has four tabs, Recent contacts the default one. Each type of call gets a separate tab too, plus there is also a message and a wireless data counter.

As far as call management is concerned, you can blacklist certain numbers and thus reject all their calls and messages. There is also a data counter for keeping track of your wireless data traffic.

With the Samsung F490 entering data comes natural - a single tap on the field highlights it, then a second one invokes the on-screen keypad. As you might have guessed, a rich T9 dictionary is also present here to help with text input. The Samsung F490 handles all four popular types of messages: SMS, EMS, MMS, and email. A single editor is used for creating the first three, while emails have their own. Messages are converted from SMS to EMS or MMS by simply applying font colors or formatting, or by inserting an image.

The message editor has two modes - the first one allows you to move your cursor around by tapping on the screen, the second one allows you to select text with your thumb. After you've marked the text with your finger, you can copy and paste it wherever you like.

A security enhancement in Samsung F490 is the Mobile Tracker (previously known as uTrack). Its purpose is to send tracking messages to pre-defined numbers in case your phone gets stolen and a SIM card other than yours is inserted. The effectiveness of this particular feature is the subject of a longer discussion, which we would rather not go into at this stage. Suffice to say, having it won't hurt at least.

Picture gallery amazes with semi-transparent menus

The file browser in Samsung F490 is pretty much the same as in most Samsung feature phones. The F490 offers 128 MB of built-in memory available to the user, which is shared among user files, MMS and emails.

There are different tabs for the phone memory and the memory card but they have similar folder structures.

There are folders for most different file types - images, video, sounds, allowing the handset to sort the memory contents. Unlike the Armani phone, here you can drag-and-drop files to move around folders.

A flaw we have found in several recent Samsung handsets is luckily not present in the Samsung F490 - the unusually slow card reading. This time Samsung have got it right.

The Samsung F490 picture gallery is part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening the Images folder. Once you open an image, the rest of the images in the folder appear on a semi-transparent bar on top. You can scroll them back and forth until you find the image that you need. A simple tap will then display it fullscreen. In fact, that way it looks much like the LG Viewty gallery, but improved.

The image gallery supports landscape orientation too. Zooming on the images is available. However it is way too slow and might get on your nerves, like it did with us.

The music player is the best of the Samsung crop and allows filtering by multiple criteria. The music player controls are so intuitive that it seems it's the place where the whole cross-thing originated - the cross-like pattern is the very essence of music control with Samsung F490.

The horizontal axis on the music player screen displays the current track running time. Thus moving the cross with your finger can skip portions of the track. A longer horizontal sweep skips to the next track in the playlist or album - a feature that was absent in F700. You can move the cross along the vertical axis too. That changes the current volume level.

Additional options allow you to easily change repeat and shuffle settings, the current equalizer preset (there are several of them) and also give tracks a rating, to later use for creating favorite playlists. Album art is also available, along with a convenient way of browsing your current playlist and changing albums on the fly.

When minimized to play in the background, the music player displays the current track on the standby screen, along with the album art, if any. And you can change tracks straight from the standby screen by a mere finger sweep on the info bar.

Generally the audio quality of Samsung F490 is below the usually high Samsung standards. Samsung take first place when it comes to audio quality of their feature phones. As you can see in the table below, the intermodulation distortion is rather high when compared to the Samsung U600 for example.

The Samsung F490 is still good at that and is almost identical to what the LG Viewty can put up. You will probably like to know that the sweet spot for getting the most out of it is two steps under the maximum volume level.

The video player on Samsung F490 has similar interface to that of the music player. It doesn't have many features but all the essentials are covered - it can play video files in fullscreen landscape mode and you can fast-forward and rewind videos. You can also jump to a specific scene in the video clip.

According to the official specifications, the video player should have been able to play WMV/MPEG4/H.263/H.264 encoded video files with a maximum resolution of VGA and a maximum framerate of 30 fps.

We were excited to test the video capabilities of the Samsung F490 given the wonderful 3.2-inch 16:9 TFT display. However we couldn't get the video player to play a WMV file no matter how low encoding settings we used. The same went true for the H.263 encoding option.

Truth be told, it did managed to play a VGA@30fps taken by the Nokia N95 8GB's camera. However a VGA movie doesn't have the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio that we were so excited about.

As you would have guessed, the video player is not capable of playing XviD or DivX-encoded videos. This is a big point for the LG Viewty, which offers DivX playback.

The Samsung F490 is equipped with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, which produces photos at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels.

The settings are extensive and include picture size, shooting mode (single shot, multi-shot, mosaic), effects (black and white, sepia, negative), white balance, and viewfinder mode (regular or widescreen).

The additional camera settings are accessible from the menu where you can switch between camera and camcorder, as well as turn on the Scene mode. Those settings include stuff like picture quality (normal, fine, superfine), ISO (100-400), exposure metering (matrix, center-weight and spot), shutter sound (can be set to off), zoom sound, brightness sound, default storage memory and default naming of photos.

The video recording capabilities of the Samsung F490 are pretty modest and nowhere near the LG Viewty skills. The Samsung F490 video recording power maxes out at 15 fps in QVGA resolution. At that resolution, the LG Viewty is capable of taking 120 fps high-speed videos.

The Samsung F490 has a web browser that supports both fullscreen and landscape browsing. It even has a mini-map that allows you to navigate over large web pages from a bird's eye view. It's much better in comparison to the Armani phone's web browser, which didn't have full featured navigation of web pages with finger swipes.

The Samsung F490 allows full navigation with swipes. However it's a bit of a letdown due to the super slow horizontal and vertical scrolling (the LG Viewty had the same disadvantage). The touch operation is nowhere near user-friendly either. Instead of picking the page and dragging it in the direction of choice, you should slide you finger in the direction you want the page to scroll. That's just the opposite of iPhone where browsing pages blends seamlessly with the rest of the UI to give the impression of almost physical interaction as you move things around with your finger.

The Samsung F490 calendar offers three views - daily, weekly and monthly. You can choose which calendar view should be default and you can pick the starting day of the week - the options are Monday or Sunday. There are five types of events available for setting up: schedule, anniversary, holiday, important and private. You can store up to 300 schedules, 50 anniversaries, 50 holidays, 20 important, 20 private events.

There are five alarm slots, each with a variety of configurable options - snooze time, repetition, etc. You can of course choose a custom ringtone to wake you up at a preset volume level. You can also choose whether your phone should automatically power up upon alarm activation. This feature can be quite handy if you have the habit of switching off your handset at night.

Among the other organizer offerings are a voice recorder, world time application, calculator, and a unit converter. There are also a memo and a to-do application for taking down notes. A countdown timer and a stopwatch are also available. The voice recorder records in .amr format and has a sixty-minute recording limitation like the Armani phone and the F700.

The calculator of the F490 is not as ridiculous as the Armani one. Here you have all your numbers and mathematical symbols on one page. It even supports calculating functions.

The Samsung F490 comes with an office documents viewer that supports Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. It's no longer a Picsel Viewer but an application by Access, who also develop the NetFront web browser used by both Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The documents viewer is quick enough when opening files, however zooming is again slow. It can also work in landscape mode, which makes reading easier with less panning.

Samsung F490 offers excellent Java support as it seems with the three demo Java games that come preinstalled. We are not aware whether those games have been specifically developed for use with such resolution or whether they have been optimized for touch input. The fact is they work flawlessly even if the play field is not stretched fullscreen and they accept touch-based input with no problems whatsoever.

n fact we've seen those games run on many of the recent Samsung handsets: Bejeweled, the BlockBreaker deluxe, and Kasparov's Chess.

Judging from our experience with the Samsung F490 we are quite sure that this fashionable handset will enjoy great market success.

Building on the capable hardware of the F700 and the iconic image of the Armani phone, Samsung F490 seems to be getting the best of both worlds. Clearly, it may seem a bit of an underdog compared to the LG Viewty, which has better video recording capabilities and DivX video playback. LG also packs a better battery and FM radio.

And yet, the Samsung F490 offers a great user interface and has the haute couture kick that the LG Viewty lacks. For the time being the F490 will be Samsung's flagship in the Touch UI arena. At least until Samsung F480 becomes available with a brand new Touch UI, more pocketable size and full of graphical goodies to blow away the gloomy colors of the F490. Till then Samsung F490 remains a nice pick.