If there is one device by Samsung to keep the crowd at fever pitch these days, it would be the Samsung U900 Soul. The latest addition to the hugely successful Ultra lineup is surely the fattest in terms of features among its siblings. Gifted with great design and nicely improved user interface, U900 Soul had us itching for a test drive ever since our first rendezvous in Barcelona.

How about kicking it off with a few shots of the Spirit of Ultra (yep, that's what the SOUL abbreviation stands for). To start with, U900 Soul is one of the beauties on the market these days. The fair amount of metal used surely benefits both design and feel.

As we've managed to confirm, Samsung U900 Soul feels great in hand and offers commendable ergonomics. The navigation solution is undoubtedly the most controversial element of the phone and user opinions will differ greatly. We, for one, did like it a lot. The touchpad is responsive and quick enough (and good looking too) to make sure the hardware D-pad won't be badly missed.

Samsung U900 Soul is obviously not the slimmest Ultra handset. In fact, it is not even among the top 3 Ultra devices. At 12.9mm thick, U900 Soul is on par with the good old Samsung D900, which is surely the most popular member of the first Ultra lineup.

As far as the Ultra lineup is concerned the U900 is supposed to excel in features rather than slimness. The 5 megapixel camera and the touch pad are unique to the family and can hardly be overlooked.

In terms of controls layout and ergonomics, Samsung U900 Soul is pretty similar to the Samsung U600 - except for the missing power button and the added video-call camera. The Soul even has the same size display with QVGA resolution.

The display itself has remarkable image quality and brightness, but is quite disappointing in terms of legibility under direct sunlight. The high brightness and contrast levels however can make us partly forgive that.

The volume rocker and the USB slot are placed on the left side of Samsung U900 Soul. The other thing worth noting here is the lanyard eyelet.

On the right side of the handset we find the dedicated camera key and the microSD card slot. These are all arranged exactly the same way as in Samsung U600.

The main difference is the front panel where several changes have been made. The first one is the added video-call camera, which was missing in the U600 (fair enough, U600 had no 3G support).

The other major change, and probably the easiest to notice, is that the D-pad is now replaced by a touch pad. It has nice haptic feedback and the vibration strength can be adjusted to the user's liking.

The sensitivity of the touchpad itself can also be configured but we ended up using it at the maximum at all times. When sensitivity is reduced the Touchpad needs a good push in order to accept a command.

The keypad of Samsung U900 Soul was one of the most pleasant surprises to us. If you have been keeping track of our recent reviews you will know that utterly flat keypads are not really our cup of tea.

The one here however uses really large keys and small metallic borders between rows to ensure great touch orientation. Also, mixing up two neighboring keys is pretty much out of the question with the U900 Soul. All this said, we can safely conclude that the keypad of Samsung U900 is really great and texters will truly enjoy the phone.

The camera of the Samsung U900 Soul is situated on the back of the phone and is only revealed when the slider is open. It is also equipped with a LED flash and a self-portrait mirror. The pixel count sounds formidable so you may rest assured that we are not going to leave the camera out of the preview. It is going to receive its due attention a little later on.

The overall build quality of Samsung U900 Soul is great and it is obvious that high quality materials have been used. The brushed metallic front panel frame and battery cover also bring a lot of positives to its design.

The user interface of Samsung U900 Soul is a slightly improved version of what we saw in the Ultra II line of handsets. It allows greater customization, as even the theme of the touchpad can be modified. You can also create your own theme, tuning every single element to your taste.

The preinstalled themes are also very nice and we happened to particularly enjoy the one named Monolithic Purity. It blends greatly with the brushed metal design and benefits the phone looks greatly.

The music player, which is one of the most essential parts of the Samsung U900, has seen little changes when compared to the other Samsung U-models. It allows filtering tracks by author, album, genre or you can choose to play either the tracks you've recently listened to, or the ones that you've played the most. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlist. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

The new thing is that, instead of equalizers, you now get to choose between sound effects - 3D-sound, hall effect, etc, which share the list with the usual presets such as Rock, Jazz and so forth.

The Samsung U900 Soul also allows track fading out and changing the visualization of the player. That, combined with the 128MB of internal memory and the card slot, gives the phone every chance of being a more than decent portable music player.

The most interesting part of the new user interface however is the new touch pad. Its icons change across applications and menus to grant quick access to the most frequently used and relevant features.

As we already mentioned, a camera with this kind of specs simply cannot go unnoticed. The Samsung U900 Soul camera interface takes full advantage of the touch pad allowing one-click access to the most frequently used features.

The last thing to address in this preview is the web browser. It left somewhat mixed impressions on the GSMArena team.

We are well familiar with the capabilities of the Net Front 3.4 web browser used here and we were disappointed to see the Samsung U900 Soul not using them all. There is no landscape view mode and the page resize feature doesn't work really well. When reducing the size, the font isn't handled properly and any text on the screen becomes compressed to being downright illegible.

On the positive side, pages are rendered well in both desktop and Smart-fit view mode. However, as mentioned, this only holds true if you are using the default page size.

It seems that Samsung U900 Soul really knows how to make a good first impression. The phone has the looks to get one's attention and the features to keep the excitement alive. The user-friendliness and wide-ranging customization make sure you won't get bored with it too quickly.

We are yet to see if the Samsung U900 Soul has what it takes to live up to its own promises. Our intuition has rarely failed us though, and it's now telling us U900 Soul is fit for market success.