Armed with solid design and the Samsung quality of build, the Samsung D880 Duos is two phones in one . It offers seamless dual SIM functionality with almost no compromise. Backed by a 3 megapixel autofocus camera and a large 2.3" QVGA TFT display, the Samsung D880 Duos is an intriguing package, truly worth closer examination. So, hop on as we head to explore the dual nature of Samsung Duos.

Seamless dual SIM functionality (both cards are active simultaneously)

3 megapixel autofocus camera with good image quality

2.3" 262K-color TFT display (QVGA resolution)

microSD memory card slot

FM radio

Bluetooth with A2DP

TV out

MS Office document viewer

Quick interface response

Large capacity battery

Comfortable keyboard and controls

Secondary SIM can be used for telephony and messaging only

Secondary SIM has dual-band support only (no 1900 MHz support)

Large size

Boring slider design

Interface options well behind the times

Poor sunlight legibility

No 3G support

Portrait-oriented camera

Poor web browser

Awkward file browser

Poor music player

Using two SIM cards in one phone is increasingly becoming an option many are willing to consider. Using both a personal and a business number with one single handset, saving some money by combining two different plans or network carriers, or regularly using local prepaid cards on business trips - to name just a few reasons why one should be interested in a dual-SIM mobile.

The initial high price tag of Samsung D880 Duos seemed rather unjustified. It really manages to replace two handsets, but it didn't seem fair for it to cost well over their combined price. Now that the price tag is more acceptable, we look at the possibilities it offers people who often carry - and are forced to use - two or more handsets.

The Samsung D880 Duos is not the first dual SIM handset on the market. Various Chinese manufacturers have been working hard in that traditionally unexplored area. We even did an article on various dual SIM solutions back in August last year to help you get started with the various options.

In the mean time, major mobile phone manufacturers seemed disinterested or were simply trying to avoid potential pressure from the telecoms, which are their main clients after all.

Samsung were first among the majors to announce a dual SIM handset in October 2007 - the D880 Duos. Rather recently Samsung announced the next of kin - Samsung D780 and are planning to expand the lineup even further in 2008.

We will talk more about the dual SIM functionality in the dedicated chapter of our review. If we've got you interested by now, hit the jump for our detailed review of Samsung D880.

Samsung D880 Duos in its essence is a regular slider phone of well aged concept and design. Yet it is neat and simple with comfortable controls and large keys. Its dimensions are 104 x 51 x 18.9 mm and it weighs 116 g. Samsung D880 Duos is obviously off the ranks of slim phones, but it fits well in hand while weight isn't such a burden.

All covers are made of plastic, while the battery cover has a soft rubber-like matt finish that ensures a great grip and looks like leather, a bit vintage in a way. Along with matt plastic, the manufacturer has also put some dark-brown glossy accents - on top and bottom of the slider. Though not looking bad or anything, the exterior is rather conventional.

Samsung D880 brings no surprises in terms of design. It is basically a "thicker D900i". Silver accents have been applied sparingly: an ornament above the speaker, a frame around the D-pad, and borders between the front controls. The other silver elements are the dual volume-control and the camera key.

The navigation pad is below the large 2.3" QVGA 256K TFT display. The D-pad with confirming action under the display is quite conservative, though comfortable and responsive. Around the D-pad the traditional two soft keys are placed. The call and end keys with the C correction key in-between are at the bottom of this layout.

The alphanumeric keypad is pretty much the same - great for typing without looking at the keys at all. The keys are large enough, with great press feedback.

The right-hand side of the Samsung D880 Duos only features the camera shutter key and the connectivity port under its plastic cover. The Connectivity port is as usual used for plugging the supplied charger, data cable, or wired headset.

The D880 Duos has a one-step shutter key, even though the camera features autofocus. A single press is in charge of focusing, locking the exposure and eventually taking the picture.

The left-hand side of the Samsung D880 features the volume rocker and the dedicated dual-SIM management key. It is fairly proof against wrong presses as it's entirely flush with the surrounding surface, as opposed to the slightly elevated shutter key and volume rocker.

The top and the bottom of the D880 are completely bereft of controls, quite typical of mobile phones in the slider form factor.

The rubber-like fake leather back panel of the Samsung D880 is entirely flat, declining at the very edges of the phone. Sliding the front up reveals the 3 megapixel camera lens and the self-portrait mirror. The camera works in portrait orientation, even if the shutter key on the left side suggests a regular landscape position. The camera key is actually quite meaningless, as it only gets used for starting the camera. While shooting, it is far more comfortable to use the center of the D-pad as a shutter key.

Removing the back panel reveals the powerful Samsung 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery. It's quoted at up to 240 h of standby time and up to the amazing 9 h of talk time. In reality the battery was an average performer - we had to recharge the G880 every three or four days.

The D880 Duos looks like a typical Samsung slider until you remove the battery and the dual-SIM bed gets revealed.

We were surprised to find the memory slot under the battery too, given the more than ample 18.9mm thickness. Hot-swapping is impossible with this design.

We really liked the way the Samsung D880 feels in hand. The smooth front finish and the slip-proof back panel, as well as the comfortable size and weight make for a really pleasurable experience. If you find it hard to understand our appreciation for the classic Samsung lines, a few days of using the D880 will probably change your mind.

The Samsung D880 Duos has a shiny 2.3" TFT screen of QVGA resolution capable of displaying up to 256K colors. As usual for Samsung, visibility under direct sunlight is poor.

The white keypad backlighting is even and strong enough. The navigation keys backlighting adds to the high level of user-friendliness the Samsung D880 Duos offers.

Samsung D880 Duos has interface with typical Samsung styling. The standby screen doesn't offer the Samsung dynamic Home screen with the uGo feature. All you can use is regular wallpaper. You can also opt to display Calendar or a single/dual zone clock.

The main menu consists of a 4 x 3 grid of icons. They have a nice gradient background. You also have a choice of four graphic themes. The interface itself is amazingly responsive (obviously there's a capable processor behind all this) and there are nice graphical transitions when you move around the menus - the screens don't just appear, they slide in nicely instead.

The phonebook of Samsung D880 Duos can store up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields. You can set it to save your new contacts by default to either your phone memory, SIM 1 or SIM 2 (or of course get prompted every time). When displaying contacts however, you only have the following choices: phone memory, SIM memory (which means both SIM cards) or both Phone and SIM memory. Other than that, over 25 fields of information are available for each contact.

As expected, signal reception with the Samsung D880 Duos phone was excellent (on both SIM cards). A nice feature when dialing is the smart search. When you enter some digits, the handset offers you to choose from several contacts that contain them.

Samsung D880 Duos can handle SMS, MMS, and email. Naturally, a T9 dictionary is at hand and it does its job quickly and intuitively. Incoming messages, like calls, can be blocked based on a user-defined black list.

The email client is relatively good but it doesn't support SSL, so it's useless with providers that require it - like Gmail.

The Samsung D880 file browser is pretty much standard for Samsung handsets. There are 60MB of internal memory at your disposal. And of course you can always expand that thanks to the memory card slot.

There are folders for different types of files - images, video, music, sounds, which allow the handset to sort the memory contents. You can copy or move files freely and you can create and delete folders.

We were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that switching between phone memory and the memory card is quite uncommon - you should use the # and • keys for that - go figure! We've seen a similar solution with Motorola, but never with Samsung - at least in recent years.

The picture gallery is an inherent part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening the Images folder. You can view the pictures as a plain list or as a list with thumbnails. And again, you can sort files by date, type, name, and size. You can view pictures in both portrait and landscape. Again, thanks to the capable processor browsing and zooming images is a pleasure.

Samsung handsets usually excel in terms of music player capabilities (and audio quality too , we should add). With Samsung D880 Duos this is not the case unfortunately.

The Music player lacks the advanced track filtering found on most Samsung handsets (and Sony Ericsson units too for that matter) such as author, album, genre, recent, favorites or whatever. It falls back to the original dummy functionality seen way back in Samsung D900.

You can create your own playlists of course, but you better put your music in the auto-created Music folder on the memory card, otherwise adding tracks from another folder is too much hassle. Other Samsung handsets didn't have any problems auto updating their Music library with all the tracks you have on memory card no matter where they are stored.

The music player can be minimized to play in the background, but the current playing track doesn't show up on the standby screen so you can't control it freely.

The Samsung D880 comes complete with an FM radio. There is no support for RDS but, unlike the Music player, you can control the radio straight from the Home screen.

The video player 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.

Judging on our experience Samsung know how to make a phone with good audio quality. Therefore it is no surprise that Samsung D880 Duos can easily outperform most of the devices out there in this area.

Even though it's got a basic music player, Samsung the D880 Duos scores very well on every audio quality reading. The only thing that is a bit out of order is the IMD level which is almost five times higher than the Samsung U600 for example. As you can see from the table however this number isn't really that much of an issue.

The Samsung D880 Duos comes with a 3 megapixel autofocus camera with a maximum image resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It doesn't have a LED flash though.

The camera interface is intuitive and follows the current trend of displaying settings with icons in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen, while options appear as popup menus. The settings are extensive and include picture size, shooting mode (single, multi-shot, mosaic shot and panorama), color effects (black and white, negative, sepia, etc.), white balance, and ISO (up to 400).

Unfortunately, the camera sensor is orientated so that the camera should be used in portrait mode only. That means you can't go fullscreen without cropping some of the visible area of your viewfinder. No matter if you choose portrait or landscape mode - when you select the fullscreen mode for the viewfinder it crops the live feed from the camera lens so that it fits the display. Not to worry though, the actual photos taken by the camera are not cropped. Samsung D900 had the same issues by the way and that didn't stop it from becoming a bestseller.

The camera key is useless for focusing since it's not a two-step one. The auto focus system is relatively reliable but photos of still objects turn out best due to the comparatively long shutter lag.

We were pleasantly surprised by the image quality it's able to achieve - the colors are true to the original and the dynamic range is sufficient. Noise is kept under control and photos are fine with the sparing sharpening applied.

Finally, we come to the video recording capabilities of the camera. Samsung D880 shoots video in the so-called Camcorder mode. The user interface of the camcorder doesn't differ from the one of the still camera except for some of the available options.

When it comes to video recording the Samsung D880 Duos offers CIF video at 15fps. Videos at this resolution are recorded in MPEG4 format.

Check out our Samsung D880 sample video and judge for yourselves.

With the Samsung D880 you can count on EDGE and GPRS only for browsing internet on the go. Unfortunately, the handset doesn't come with the latest NetFront 3.4 web browser but instead uses the older Openwave browser seen in handsets such as Samsung D900. The Openwave web browser doesn't even have a desktop-like rendering view mode and most images are resized beyond recognition with the default Smart Fit option.

Although the D880 large display may seem attractive for web browsing the lack of faster 3G speeds combined with the underpowered browser makes the Samsung D880 Duos unattractive for web surfing.

Adequate organizer, while the document viewer is a nice touch

The Samsung D880 calendar offers three views - daily, weekly and monthly. There are five types of events available: appointment, anniversary, holiday, important, and private. The number of alarm slots is also five, 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.

Among the other offerings are the voice memo recorder, a world time application, a calculator, and a unit converter. A countdown timer and a stopwatch are also available.

The Samsung D880 Duos also has an office documents viewer like most Samsung handsets out there.

When it comes to games, Samsung D880 is quite well geared. A whole bunch of games are preinstalled just waiting for you to have some free time to spend. The games that the Samsung D880 bundles up are Cannonball, Forgotten Warrior, Freekick, Arch Angel, Minigolf Las Vegas (trial), Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest (trial), Tetris Mania (trial) and Asphalt 2 (trial).

You've probably seen every one of them on other Samsung handsets.

The pivotal feature of Samsung D880 is indeed the dual SIM capability. It is important to note that even though the two SIM cards are active simultaneously, there still are some limitations.

It starts with the master and slave SIM card hierarchy. The master SIM is the default (primary) one used for calls, messaging, GPRS/EDGE, etc, while the slave card has only calls and SMS capability. Of course, the master and slave cards can be swapped with a flick of a system setting, but in this case a reboot is required.

The crucial aspect of this subordination is the weird frequency band limitation - only the master SIM card has tri-band GSM support. The slave SIM is dual-band only - that makes the dual SIM functionality unusable in countries that use the 1900 Mhz band such as North America.

When you insert one or two new SIM cards in Samsung D880, you need to assign them names and priority to get started. Once you are done, you can start reaping the dual SIM benefits. If you need to make changes to that setup later, you can open the simple SIM management interface by pressing the dedicated key on the handset's left side. The interface is accessible from the Settings menu too.

The SIM management interface is rather simple, allowing the user to set the primary card, and to name or enable/disable one or both cards. While the enable/disable option is a matter of mere seconds, changing the primary and secondary card requires a restart of the phone.

When you want to call somebody, all you need is type or scroll the phone number and then choose which card to use for the outgoing call. The primary SIM is default and pressing the call key directly dials the number using it.

However, if you wish to call using the secondary SIM card, pressing the dedicated SIM management key switches the SIM card for the outgoing call. There are no delays or glitches whatsoever using this feature. We are particularly pleased with the Samsung implementation of this interface.

Upon an incoming call the caller number/name is accompanied by the name of the SIM card which is receiving the call.

The Call log is also very well geared to accommodate the dual SIM functionality. It displays the type of call (incoming, outgoing, etc.), the SIM card, the caller number/name and the number of calls. When you select a log entry, you can see the entire call history, including the time and date, the SIM card again and the call duration. You can opt to return the call using the default SIM card or the secondary one.

A new number can easily be saved in either the phone memory or on one of the two SIM cards. Bear in mind though that the contact list has three view options only: phone memory, SIM memory (which means both SIM cards) or phone and SIM simultaneously.

The phonebook itself displays the name, the default number (when a name is highlighted) and the memory used for contact storage - an icon to the right for SIM 1 and SIM 2 designates where the contact is stored.

Composing a new message doesn't differ from any other Samsung phone and is much like making a call. If a message is sent straight away it goes through the primary SIM card. However with a single press of the dual SIM key, you can channel it through the secondary SIM.

So, that's about all there is to know about call and message management in a dual SIM scenario. Again, as we already said in the beginning of this review, bear in mind that there are certain limitations to the technology, too. You can only use the primary SIM card for GPRS/EDGE connectivity and it's only the primary SIM card that benefits from tri-band connectivity. The secondary SIM card works in dual-band mode only.

Samsung D880 Duos is above all a handset of balance. It doesn't offer cutting edge solutions in external design, form factor, or interface capabilities. Yet it manages to deliver some style in looks (in a subdued and conservative way) and a snappy user interface. And besides it's the only handset produced by some of the major manufacturers to feature dual SIM functionality. The only test the Duos truly fails is web browsing and the lack of 3G.

That aside, Samsung D880 has a nice 3 megapixel camera, a large display and some nice connectivity options such as stereo Bluetooth and TV-out (the large capacity battery is welcome too). The FM radio is a nice bonus. Of course you can get those in more affordable models such as Samsung D900i, so the main selling point of the D880 Duos remains the dual SIM functionality.

Having two SIM cards in one handset is something many would appreciate. The only thing to beat that is a pair of Nokia 6500 classics, which pretty much make the same bump in your pocket (just kidding).

Now that Samsung D880 is more affordable than ever, it's a tempting offer - especially if it takes two phones to meet your communication needs. So if you don't mind the crippled secondary SIM card functionality (dual-band only), the lame web browser and the lack of 3G , you are all good to go with Samsung D880 Duos.

Fascinating as they are, ultra high-end handsets are not everybody's cup of tea. In fact, the good old mid-range is the bread and butter for every successful mobile phone company, for that's what gets those sales numbers right. As we see it, Samsung i550 might just be the phone to perfectly fit this description. It doesn't yell expensive out loud, but has great all-round functionality and might just become tomorrow's classic.

2.6" 262K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution

3G with HSDPA

Trackball navigation

Built-in GPS receiver

Symbian OS with S60 user interface

Wi-Fi (Samsung i550w only)

3 megapixel camera with auto focus

MicroSD card slot

3.5mm stereo audio jack

FM radio

Decent battery life

Bluetooth with A2DP support

Tri-band GSM support only

Trackball is somewhat slow

No two-step shutter key

No Wi-Fi (Samsung i550)

A bit too conservative looks

Video recoding limited to QVGA resolution

Awkward soft key layout

No RDS

When first announced, the Samsung i550 had only one version and it crucially lacked Wi-Fi. However, just as it started hitting the shelves, a second WLAN enabled version named Samsung i550w popped up. 

The two versions have no other differences in terms of hardware or software. Anyway, the second version places Samsung i550 in a somewhat different league - handsets that have it (almost) all. It may not have the best camera or GPS receiver around but performs adequately in both departments and that is what really matters most of the time.

Right now the Samsung i550 seems to have no direct market rivals. It's considerably cheaper than Nokia N82 and N95, or Samsung G810, which makes any comparison unfair. Even the N95 classic costs more than what you would pay for a Samsung i550. All of these handsets have a number of extra features on top of what the i550 has to offer but, as we found out, they're all on par in terms of usability and user friendliness.

Nokia N78 is probably the most similarly equipped phone but we are yet to see its market release. Nokia haven't been so kind of supplying us with pre-release handsets for testing - a rather quirky marketing decision.

So for now, Samsung i550 is the only handset in this market niche and that seems a good enough stepping stone to success.

One last thing before the actual review gets going. The Samsung i550 we had for the test was a beta unit, some i-dotting and t-crossing short of being ready for the shelf.

If we must summarize, we would definitely call Samsung i550 conservative. It does have its strong points but is by far not the most inspiring handset in terms of design. In fact, the plastic used on its body looks downright cheap. To put it mildly, we weren't impressed.

In terms of size the Samsung i550 stands at 115 x 53 x 13.8 mm, a decent and quite pocket-friendly achievement. It is surely on the slim side of smartphones and one of the slimmest to offer a similar or better feature pack.

Samsung i550 will be offered in two color versions -black and silver. Frankly, we do appreciate the silver one more but the black one isn't that much of an eyesore either. Anyway, appeal is not what this handset is about.

The front panel of the phone is dominated by the large 2.6" display. The earpiece is located right above it, dead center. In the left corner is the video-call camera. No surprises here.

Under the display is the trackball, which is the key navigation tool in the phone. We do like trackballs and this particular one had every chance of impressing us. Well, it failed. It was far too slow and needed a whole lot of rolling to move a single icon. It might be Samsung's first go at trackballs but we still expected more. Anyway, we are going to get back to the trackball and the rest of the keypad a little later in our review.

The left side of Samsung i550 features the microSD card slot, the volume rocker and the neck/wrist strap eyelet. The volume rocker has nice ergonomics and tactility but is a little too hard to press for our taste.

On the right side of Samsung i550 we found the USB slot and the dedicated camera key. The latter was a real downer for the lack of a half-press, which makes operating the camera rather unnatural. We can't see any good reason for Samsung doing such a thing but, after all, the camera is not the key feature in i550 so it may as well get away with that.

Topside of Samsung i550 we have the power key and the 3.5mm jack. The power key also gives access to the ringing profiles. We find the location of the 3.5mm jack very convenient; it's most comfortable for wearing the handset in you pocket with headphones plugged in.

The bottom part of Samsung i550 is quite plain. The only adornment here is a wide gray stripe.

At the back side of the phone is the 3 megapixel camera lens. It goes with a LED flash which, as you may have guessed, is rather inadequate. Producing good night photos is hard for even the best equipped cameraphones and Samsung i550 falls seriously short of being one of them. There is also a self-portrait mirror backstage so you can frame you self-portraits better. More about the camera is coming up in the dedicated part of the review.

Removing the battery cover reveals the 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery. It will keep you going for a good 3.5 days under moderate use (a few calls and messages plus about 40 minutes of using the other phone's features a day). It is about what you expect, given the size of the screen. Plus, Wi-fi and GPS take their toll on battery life too.

To summarize, we are pleased with the build quality of Samsung i550. It looks sturdy and problems such as paint peeling seem very unlikely. What we are not happy about however is the rather cheap look. It's a fine line between neat and cheap but we, for one, were on the wrong side of it.

As already mentioned, Samsung i550 is equipped with a generously sized 2.6" 262K-color display. The supported resolution is QVGA (320 x 240) pixels, which is about as much as most other Symbian devices will offer.

As far as picture quality is concerned, Samsung i550 is doing pretty well. It has good contrast and brightness. Although we've seen better from Samsung, the i550 is still good enough.

On the negative side, the i550 has the typical weak legibility under direct sunlight. On a bright sunny day it is quite a challenge to find a proper angle for working with the phone. We are starting to wonder if Samsung is ever going to do anything about this. After all, there are plenty of other manufacturers to manage displays of great picture quality and adequate sunlight legibility (Nokia and Apple come to mind straight away).

The alphanumeric keypad on Samsung i550 is decent, allowing quick enough typing. It might not be the best looking keypad in business but it does the job.

The keys are rather minimalist in size, the spacing between them however is enough to provide adequate touch orientation. Still with the amount of space available for the keypad we wish Samsung did a bit better. After all, business device or else, typing should not let Samsung i550 down.

We are quite sure that a little time spent with Samsung i550 should solve the thin key problem and users will speed their way through the lines of text.

The real problem with the keypad of Samsung i550 are the six keys placed around the trackball. Those are arranged contrary to any logic and really got on our nerves during our reviewing. The problem is that the more frequently used soft keys are smaller than the dedicated web and GPS buttons. Now, don't get us wrong - having shortcuts to those two features is great but the implementation in i550 is disastrous. In addition, the shortcuts keys launch the corresponding application regardless of the currently open menu item. If the selection keys were placed at least on the same level as the shortcuts a lot of wrong presses would have been avoided. Instead, the elevation of the shortcut keys really makes it as bad as it can get.

The trackball itself is another controversial part of the Samsung i550 hardware. As much as we like trackball navigation, we just couldn't let it get away with the painfully slow response. Rolling a thumb all the way we only managed to move about two icons in the menu. Scrolling through very long lists (usually in the gallery or file manager) will probably take quite a lot of time and effort.

Backlighting is also somewhat uneven. Still, with the sufficient spacing between keys usability in dark environments doesn't suffer that much. In addition the trackball is pleasantly illuminated in blue and that looks really cool.

All in all, apart from the decent typing, the Samsung i550 keypad is a sounding failure to us. We do hope the trackball speed has been corrected in the retail version making navigation at least passable.

Quite as expected, the i550 lives up to Samsung's reputation as regards reception and in-call sound. Voice clarity on both ends of a call is commendable and in terms of clear reception it's completely competitive to what other manufacturers have to offer.

Samsung i550 is running on the Symbian 9.2 OS and uses the well known S60 3rd edition graphic user interface. The Feature Pack 1 also comes pre-installed. It brings in a bunch of nice upgrades to the original 3rd edition, such as multiple alarm slots and longer voice recording capabilities.

In general the result has turned out very good. Samsung i550 is one snappy device with great handling. Looks are also quite decent with the handsome Samsung styling of icons.

Being a Symbian handset, Samsung i550 features an active stand-by mode. You have a bar of shortcut icons for instant access to pre-selected functions at the top of the display, while scheduled events from the calendar along with the currently playing track or radio station (if any) get displayed underneath.

When assigning Active Standby shortcuts, you can choose any application or even a website. The functionality of the two soft keys is configurable too. Another standby screen feature that we really like is the Google search bar giving instant access to the search engine.

The phone has 5 profiles plus an offline mode that switches off all transceivers. It is also the default profile if you start the handset without a SIM card. The offline mode allows full access to the functions of the phone that do not require cellular network coverage. 

All the profiles can easily be edited to best suit your needs.

As with any other S60 smartphone, the task manager of Samsung i550 pops up upon a press-and-hold on the Menu key. It allows switching between applications or turning off any running application by pressing the Clear key.

There are only two different menu views for the i550 but they are practically what the majority is using. Whether the icons will appear as a 4 x 3 grid of icons, or as a standard list, is completely up to the user.

Finally, Samsung i550 has a voice recognition feature that (supposedly) allows you to control the whole user interface without even having to touch the phone. It does all right but still not as well as we hoped. Although speaker independent, the application has trouble recognizing some user commands, especially the longer ones. It's still a good help on some occasions and, given the beta status of our unit, it may even be better in the retail version of Samsung i550.

If you get bored with the phone's looks, you can always change the theme. There are only two preinstalled themes on Samsung i550. Anyway, downloading additional themes for a Symbian S60 device is a walk in the park. There is hardly anything in greater number on the internet than themes for S60 3rd edition phones with QVGA resolution displays.

True to its Symbian nature, Samsung i550 is equipped with a phonebook with practically unlimited capabilities. The number of entries is only limited by the available memory, which means that you will have no problems even with thousands of contacts.

Contacts can be ordered by either first or last name, depending on the user's liking. Searching can be done by either scrolling through names, gradual typing of the desired contact or a combination of both. The phone will search in both first and last name fields, as well as additional names in those fields. This means that even if a contact has a really complicated name, you will have no problem finding it provided you remember at least a part of it.

While editing a contact, you can select from a huge number of preset fields, which you can repeat as many times as you like. There is no way any information about the contact will have to be left out. You can attach as many numbers as you like to each contact as well. Finally, if by some very rare chance, you happen to need a field that doesn't exist, you can always use one of the existing ones and simply rename it.

The Call log department has always been a Symbian strength. The Samsung i550 makes no exception, offering detailed information of all your communications for the past 30 days. It stores all the calls, messages and even data transfers for that period. You can also reduce the amount of saved data but it doesn't use up that much space so such a choice is unlikely.

There is also a more convenient way to access your latest calls. Pressing the call key in standby brings up three tabs on the screen. Each of them holds up to 20 missed or received calls, or dialed numbers.

People who send and receive lots of messages are likely to appreciate the S60 user interface. The messaging menu is really logically organized, which makes it a pleasure to work with.

The SMS editor is a very intuitive and easy to use application. It has a counter of the characters left to the limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending if that limit is exceeded. If you are exiting the message editor without having sent the message, the editor offers to either save it to the drafts folder or delete it.

Naturally, a delivery report can be activated if the user prefers. The reports pop up on the standby screen, and are consequently saved in a separate folder in the messaging sub-menu. This is surely one of the most convenient ways of dealing with the delivery reports we have seen.

The MMS editor is almost identical to the one just described. The only noticeable difference is the added subject line and the option of inserting multimedia content.

Finally, there is also an audio message editor. Every time we are reviewing a Symbian device we get to wonder if anyone is ever using this option. Well, it continues to be available so maybe there are such people after all. The editor can either record the message on the fly or use a previously recorded sound clip. Anyway, last time we checked audio messages were simply a type of MMS so it isn't actually worth the fuss.

The great email client won't surprise anyone who has ever used a Symbian powered phone. It supports POP3 and IMAP protocols and can download headers only, as well as the whole messages. There is also support for attachments, so with Samsung i550 you will have no trouble meeting almost any emailing requirement.

The overall impression with the Samsung i550 messaging department is really positive. In terms of software users have all the reasons to forgive the keypad shortfalls. In addition, the email client is so good that it will hardly leave anyone disappointed. This of course was to be expected as Samsung i550 is meant to be a business device.

Samsung i550's music player looks exactly like on other Symbian 3rd edition devices. It can either be accessed from the menu or from the dedicated shortcut key, located on the right of the trackball.

It is surely not the most attractive application in terms of looks and it also lacks some features the music players in other handsets have to offer. For example there are no equalizers - neither presets, nor the option to make a custom one. The other flaw of the music player is the lack of any type of visualization to freshen up the looks. Neither of those is however that much of a deal breaker.

The music player has the essentials covered. As usual with Symbian devices, Samsung i550 supports a huge number of audio formats including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed flawlessly and files are automatically added to the music library once loaded to the phone.

Tracks can easily be transferred to the phone via Bluetooth, USB or by simply downloading them from the internet. Upon completing USB synchronization, the phone automatically prompts scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds the new ones to the music library. You can sort tracks based on artist, album, genre and composer.

Another thing to mention is that Samsung i550 supports the Bluetooth A2DP profile. This means that you are able to listen to your favorite tracks on stereo Bluetooth headphones. We had no trouble pairing Samsung i550 with a third party Bluetooth headset.

Samsung i550 comes with Real player and Flash player preinstalled. The videos can be displayed in both portrait and landscape mode according to the user's preferences. You can also switch to full screen to make better use of the ample display. In fullscreen, the softkey labels are hidden, so they don't stand in the way, and only pop up when a key is pressed. The large display and the great picture quality are also enhancing the video watching experience greatly.

If you get bored with the preinstalled content on your Samsung i550 you can always turn the radio on. The FM radio can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. If it wasn't for the missing RDS, it might have just been as good as it gets.

Even though a business-minded smartphone, the great audio quality of the device sticks out a mile. It is one of the best handsets we have tested so far and we've seen quite a few. In fact, the audio quality of Samsung i550 is comparable and, in some aspects, even better than some dedicated portable music players. We are really pleased that Samsung didn't compromise the audio capabilities of the i550, never mind that business comes first. Here are the results so you can see for yourselves.

The Samsung Symbian smartphones lack the 3D rotating gallery of Nokia N-series smartphones, which we really enjoy. With the Samsung i550 we were only left with the list view for displaying images and videos. This is however something we can live with as its absence isn't damaging the functionality by any means.

The gallery allows viewing pictures in both normal and full screen mode. Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it for greater detail. The actual zooming and panning is quite fast and isn't going to bother anyone. As a matter of fact, the same holds true for almost any aspect of the user interface.

The Samsung i550 gallery also offers adequate file-managing capabilities allowing selection and sending of multiple files. In addition to that, the smartphone has the usual file manager that does a very good job itself. It allows filtering files according to the memory used as well as marking, moving, copying single or multiple files at a time.

The Application manager is supposed to take care of the installed applications on Samsung i550. It is very familiar, consistent across Symbian S60 3rd edition devices. Its purpose is to keep track of the installed and removed programs on you phone and facilitate uninstalling of unwanted programs. It does that job pretty well too.

Regretfully, the Samsung handsets have no feature similar to the "Search" application we found on Nokia phones. This means you have to spend a little extra time organizing your files and applications, unless you want to end up in a mess. Anyways, there are a bunch of third-party applications, available for download that are up to the task.

Another thing we are missing is the WLAN wizard plug-in, which greatly facilitates using the Wi-Fi. It makes connecting to available hotspots a piece of cake. Instead, with Samsung i550 you have to do a bit more work, navigating through a couple more menus. You might want to go and download this application too but there is no guarantee of its compatibility with Samsung i550. Naturally, this whole thing holds for the Wi-fi-enabled Samsung i550w only.

The fact that Samsung i550 is supposed to be a business device has had a somewhat negative impact on the camera. For one, the lack of a two-step shutter key is quite a disappointment. It makes shooting with the autofocus camera rather unnatural and makes achieving good results harder.

The camera interface isn't the most user-friendly we have seen either. The number of available features number is but moderate. White balance and effects are included and so are flash settings and self-timer. 

There are also three image quality options - basic, normal and high and that completes the list of options worth mentioning. You should bear in mind that the LED flash is rather inadequate so usable pictures in low light conditions are not very likely to achieve with Samsung i550.

At least the picture quality is on the positive side. Color rendering is precise and the detail levels are very good. The noise levels are acceptable even with not the best lighting. The image processing algorithm is also very good and there isn't much detail loss due to noise reduction. All in all, it is on the better side of 3 megapixel shooters. We would have really liked it if it wasn't for the lack of two-step shutter key and the speed. The camera of Samsung i550 is rather slow, taking about 5 seconds to take a photo after you press the shutter key. Our guess is that a part of the reason is that the auto focus isn't the snappiest around and that really takes its toll.

As far as video recoding is concerned, the Samsung i550 is only able to manage QVGA resolution. Videos have a frame rate of 15fps and are saved in 3gp format. This means that most of the videos taken with the i550 will turn out useless but some exceptions might be expected. However we cannot help ourselves but feel that Samsung i550 camera and video are only a little short of being just great. Too bad the Samsung R&D team saved themselves the effort.

Regarding connectivity, Samsung i550 is among the most tempting offers around. Well, we mean the i550w version only. We haven't yet come around to saying this but now might just be the right time: we cannot see any point in purchasing the version without WLAN. After all, Wi-Fi is among the make-or-break smartphone features.

But first thing first - let's start with the wired connectivity capabilities of Samsung i550. The USB connectivity is truly seamless, as with any other Symbian device. You can set a default profile when a cable is connected or you'll be prompted every time.

In the wireless department you get the aforementioned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP support. The card slot is also an option with the good data transfer rate card readers can offer.

The network connectivity is also at the expected high level with GPRS, EDGE and 3G all covered. HSDPA is also on board to further enhance network data transfer speeds. The only thing missing is the Infrared port, but we doubt it anyone is using those anymore.

As you probably know, we do fancy Symbian web browsers. The Samsung i550 makes no exception, plus on the generously-sized display pages look really great.

Browsing the internet with Samsung i550 is a pleasure. No matter how elaborate the web page, it fits perfectly on the screen and looks almost exactly like on a PC. The virtual mouse cursor earns the handset another point. It is easy to control and generally works great. A mini-map can be activated to help finding your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The zoom level is also adjustable at the expense of only a few key presses. This is where the 2.6" screen gets much appreciated, as it makes the font readable even when downsized to only a few pixels height.

Organizing applications come by the dozen in Symbian handsets. Those are also very practical and usually quite user-friendly.

The Samsung i550 calendar has three different types of view - monthly, weekly and daily, and four types of events available for scheduling - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Each event has its own unique fields and some allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The mobile office applications are also reasonably well covered. The preinstalled applications are able to open Word and Excel files trouble-free. There is also a PDF reader in the package. However the Samsung i550 lack support for editing documents. If you are to need this feature you will have to purchase the full version of the office application.

Here are some of the other included organizing and time-management applications: a very capable unit converter and a decent calculator, as well as a Notes application. There is of course also a convenient voice recorder. As we mentioned the recording length is now up to an hour.

Finally, we come to the Samsung i550 alarm. You can set up a virtually unlimited number of alarms on your handset. Furthermore, each of these can have its own name, activation day and repeat pattern. You can also adjust the snooze time. In addition the clock offers to show you the time in any time zone of the world.

The final noteworthy feature of Samsung i550 is the built-in GPS receiver. The chip is not the most sensitive we have seen and needs quite a lot of time to get a satellite lock. Tall buildings around are making the situation even worse. There might be improvements but we doubt it they will be revolutionary.

Samsung officially claims the i550 is supposed to come complete with Google Maps preinstalled. Well, our beta unit certainly didn't. Not that it makes any difference, as Google maps are free to download and installing them only takes a minute. Still, we would've liked it if Navigon had the task of developing a dedicated software solution for the i550 as they did for Samsung G810 and Samsung i780. Else, users will have the option of third party navigation software.

Samsung i550 is a very capable device by all means. It blends a great bunch of features with the power of Symbian and the S60 user interface. The combination works out quite well and the result is a phone of great potential.

Although still not widely available, Samsung i550 can be found at about 390$. This is the Wi-Fi version we are talking about and it does sound a great deal to us. We guess the handset will be able to steal quite a few customers from Nokia Symbian devices.

Of course, Samsung i550 does have its annoying flaws here and there. We have tried our best to point them out, so users can decide if they are that much of a bother to them. Our guess is that once they've spent some time getting used to the i550 (mainly the selection keys layout and the trackball response) owners won't regret their purchase.

To pick up where we left, prepare to meet the next bestseller by Samsung. If you think Samsung F480 is not up to such a challenge you might want to think again. The compact touch-operated handset has every chance of becoming the next best thing since sliced bread. It is extremely pocket-friendly but its own pocket is bulging - so to say - the little fella has it all. Plus, the looks are fantastic, so only one important question remains - is the performance on par with the marvelous specs. Luckily we are just about to answer that question, so sit back and enjoy.

Ample 2.8" 262K touchscreen color display of QVGA resolution

Touch-operated flash UI

5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash

Camera comes with face detection and wide dynamic range

3G with HSDPA

Great design and high quality construction

228MB of internal memory

microSD card slot

Widgets

Excellent haptics

FM radio with RDS

Great camera interface

EDGE, Bluetooth and USB connectivity

Great web browser

Tri-band only

Display legibility suffers under direct sunlight

No landscape mode and no virtual QWERTY keyboard

Fingerprint magnet

Inadequate flash for the camera

Video recording capabilities max out at QVGA resolution

The place on the market Samsung F480 is aiming at is far from vacant. There is a number of touch-operated Flash UI devices out there and, accidentally or not, most of them are made by Samsung.

The Armani phone is probably one of the bitterest rivals of Samsung F480. As we see it, the … well… designer handset has very little chance against the F480. The device we are currently reviewing is far more capable and its interface is well above the Armani. The difference in specs is also important. So much so that, if it wasn't for the haute couture engraving, the Armani phone would have been nothing more than the goofy sibling.

Samsung F490 is also taking part in this race but despite that its name suggests higher class than the F480, its functionality is not speaking of anything like that. The Croix interface may be an award winner, but is not nearly as nice to use as the flash UI of Samsung F480. Besides, the F480 definitely looks better and is more compact.

The LG KU990 Viewty is another similar handset in terms of functionality but of a significantly larger size. Still, it may seem as a good alternative for those who insist on good camera and video recording capabilities in their handsets.

So, crowded as it is in the touchscreen non-smartphone market, Samsung F480 seems to have good chances of success.

Samsung F480 is definitely among the most compact handsets on the market. It stands at 95.9 x 55 x 11.5 mm, which is by far beyond the powers of any other handset with a similarly sized screen. In addition, it's very sharp, the metallic accents giving it a sleek and expensive look. The glossy plastic on some parts and the front panel also look very cool. When they are not covered in fingerprint smudges that is, which sadly is the case quite often.

Contrary to the first official statement, Samsung F480 will not be offered in two different versions. Instead, the two alternative looks will come in a single package. Switching from leather case to case-free is as simple as refitting the battery cover. As the leather case itself is attached to the rear cover, so there is no other way to remove it.

The ergonomics of the Samsung F480 are very good, even if not the best we have seen. The reason for this is that the phone is a bit too small to comfortably hold in larger hands. However if your hand is smaller you'll probably find all the controls to be perfectly placed.

The earpiece is located in the middle of the front panel, about half a centimeter under the upper edge. Next to it is the video-call camera. Naturally the 2.8" screen is dominating the front panel, leaving space only for three keys underneath. Those keys are finished in stylish bronze-colored plastic and are a nice highlight designwise. They are also large enough and comfortable to work with.

The three keys in question are the call and end keys and a confirmation key in-between. The latter brings out a shortcuts menu similar to the one of the Croix interface we saw on Samsung Armani and F490. With Samsung F480 this key is a very convenient way of switching between tasks. For example, you can now switch between the internet browser, messaging and music player without having to close one and go to the other.

The left side of Samsung F480 hosts the volume rocker and the microSD slot. As you probably know from our preview, the volume rocker now offers a handy implementation in the web browser, rather than being limited to adjusting volume levels only - you can dynamically resize the web pages (The LG Viewty Jog Wheel serves for the same purpose for example).

Switching to the Samsung F480 right side, we come upon the universal USB port and the dedicated camera key. Once again Samsung have put the all-in-one USB port in charge of data transfers, connecting headsets and charging. This solution has both its pros and cons but the limited headset compatibility aside, we are willing to accept Samsung's choice. As far as the camera key is concerned, we find it a bit too stiff and hard to work with, but getting used to it is achievable.

The top of Samsung F480 features the lanyard eyelet and the hold button. The hold button is used for locking the screen and the keys of the phone. It can be very convenient if you want to avoid unwanted presses. Those are hard to produce anyway, as the screen is sensitive to fingers only, but we guess you can't be too cautious.

The mouthpiece is all there at bottomside. It is slightly to the right, as with most recent Samsung devices.

Most parts of the back panel of Samsung F480 are made of metal. As already mentioned, this greatly benefits the design and, as far as we can guess, durability too. In the top left corner of the back panel are the 5 megapixel camera and the LED flash. We will discuss those two in the dedicated camera chapter of our review.

Removing the battery cover is done by simply sliding it down. The slightly lifted lower edge is of great help here. Beneath lies the battery, but unfortunately details about its capacity are not available at this stage. As far as we are able to tell, the handset is capable of making it through two days of moderate to heavy use with one full charge. When used rather moderately, the phone achieves five days of stand-by without a problem. Knowing what most handsets with similarly-sized screens are capable of this is a decent achievement indeed.

We are delighted with the build quality of Samsung F480. It is obvious that high-quality materials have been used. No creaks are to be heard anywhere and, save for the fingerprint vulnerability, the handset is brilliantly finished. We for one did have some trouble getting used to handling it, due to its small dimensions but this might not be the same for everyone.

The main feature of Samsung F480 is undoubtedly its display. The 2.8" QVGA screen is capable of showing up to 262K colors. As we found out, the widescreen resolution of the Samsung F490 is by no means that hip as it sounds. Obviously the 16:9 aspect ratio did bring more compatibility issues than great benefits with some applications. 

Therefore we feel happy that Samsung returned to the good old QVGA for Samsung F480.

As far as image quality is concerned, we have no complaints with Samsung F480. It has great contrast and nice saturated colors. The brightness is also good enough to convince us that this is one of the best Samsung displays we have seen.

Still, even the best Samsung screens suffer reduced legibility when exposed to direct sunlight. This line has become an unfailing part of every Samsung review we've done and we think it's about time the manufacturer did something about it. It can't be normal for such a high-end device to be practically useless outdoors on a sunny day.

On the positive side, the touchscreen sensitivity is great. The phone is very responsive and provides excellent haptic feedback. In addition, the vibrations intensity can be modified to best suit the user's taste.

Telephony and speakerphone performance

Samsung F480 is very good at its main job - making calls. Voice quality is very high on both ends and no interferences are to be heard. This time however there are no animations as with the non-touchscreen Samsung devices. In fact, dialing with Samsung F480 is almost as plain as it can get (save for the fact that the 12-key alphanumeric pad is on the screen).

The user interface of Samsung F480 is a good job. It's not the award-winning Croix UI we found on the recent touch-operated Samsung handsets we reviewed. However we are willing to give this one an award of ours It's lively, it's colorful and frankly, we were getting tired of flash phones insistently using only a couple of colors for the entire user interface. Furthermore, the addition of widgets allows a whole lot wider customization and improves user-friendliness.

The Widgets are basically a very convenient way for customizing your home screen. The Widget bar toggles on and off the home screen by pressing the arrow in the lower left corner.

The Widget bar itself includes a number of icons, which can be dragged onto the display and ordered to the user liking. If any is to be removed, all you need to do is drag it back to the bar.

Apart from the whole touch thing the Samsung F480 menu structure is not that different from other Samsung handsets. The only major difference is the added tab at the bottom of the display, which holds three keys with varying functionality. The icons are however more colorful and better looking than we are used to. There are also great animations used for the transitions and the other actions around the menu (selecting, scrolling).

The main menu displays as a 4 x 3 grid of icons. Sub-menus appear as lists. The much contested feature of all recent Samsung phones, whereby the last used items are highlighted by default when you open a submenu, is also present here. However due to the fact that the handset is touch-operated there is almost no difference what exactly is highlighted by default. Still, on some rare occasions when accessing longer lists this might save you some scrolling.

We are very pleased with the speed and responsiveness of the handset. Its whole interface is really snappy with no noticeable lags anywhere. The main menu is accessible from the stand-by display by pressing the right key on the tab at the bottom of the screen. You can also access it by pressing the confirmation key below the screen and then clicking the center icon on the screen.

The left and center key of the bottom tab are reserved for dialing a number and accessing the phonebook respectively. This of course is only true when the home screen or the main menu are displayed. The functionality of the three keys changes across different submenus.

The stand-by display of the F480 offers the typical Samsung layout. The top bar is reserved for standard readings like signal strength, battery status, network connectivity, ringing profile etc. As far as the rest of the display is concerned, it is entirely up to the user to decide which elements should be there and which should not.

A clock or a birthday reminder may be placed anywhere on the home screen. The operator logo and the small tabs controlling the music player and the FM radio can also be added or removed if needed. The available options are plenty but you should have got the idea by now. You can also have a quick look at the video demonstration about how the whole widgetry works.

There still aren't as many customization options for the Samsung F480 as some would have liked. In fact the owner of Samsung F480 is only capable of changing the active wallpaper and rearranging the standby screen, thanks to the widgets.

There is virtually no way of changing the icon appearance or the menu view mode. Anyway, the youthful interface looks interesting enough so you probably won't need changing it that much.

The phonebook of Samsung F480 is just like what we are used to seeing in this manufacturer's devices. It stores up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields. It can display the names from either the SIM card or the phone memory, or both can appear simultaneously. Searching is done by gradual typing of the desired contact's name.

Quite a number of different information fields are available for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers, 4 email addresses, URLs and so on. Each contact can also be assigned a specific ringtone and picture, as well as a note. You can even set a video as "caller's image" - a feature that is now becoming pretty common.

Contacts can be organized into groups, which can then have their own ringtones and pictures. There is also a birthday field, which can be synced to the calendar upon a few clicks. This is quite a convenient solution. Contact details or your whole contacts list can be sent via Bluetooth, email or text message.

The Call Log application keeps track of the user's latest calls. Both the Call key in stand-by and the call log icon from the menu give you access to the same application. It has four tabs - recent contacts, dialed numbers, received and missed calls. Those tabs were somewhat inconveniently separate between two applications in some of the previous Samsung models but luckily this is not the case with F480. Finally, there are also data and call time counters and even a call cost feature can be enabled if you provide information about your subscription plan.

As you might have expected all common types of messages are handled by Samsung F480. The handset has a common editor for SMS, EMS, MMS and a separate one for emails. A rich T9 dictionary is at the user's disposal too. In case message sending fails, the message is automatically saved to the outbox, so you can try sending it later.

The input method is only one - a 12-key keypad appears on the screen and the user gets to type as if on a regular handset. The keys are all large enough but typing on touchscreen is usually not the best experience. Haptics help but are still short of the good out press feedback of regular keys. Nonetheless, the not so heavy texters will probably enjoy the messaging capabilities of Samsung F480 (you should know that the LG Viewty has an on-screen QWERTY keyboard).

If you like you can also activate a delivery report for the SMS and EMS. MMS can have a preset size limit of either 30, 100 or 300 KB.

There is room for 500 SMS, 30 push messages, 200 broadcast messages and 30 configuration messages in the phone memory. As far as emails and MMS are concerned, they are not limited in number and storage depends on the free memory only. There is normally plenty of space available for those, as the built-in memory is a good 228 MB. Incoming messages, like calls, can also be blocked based on a user-defined black list.

The email client is very good. It can manage up to five accounts - POP or IMAP; download is user-defined, opting between headers only and entire messages. Not only any files from the phone memory, but also business cards, calendar events, tasks or notes can be emailed as attachments. The client can be set up to check mail at a chosen interval (options vary from 30 minutes to 1 day). There is even a built-in filter that allows you to block email based on address or subject.

Finally, Samsung F480 also features the SOS message feature. It allows you to quickly send an SOS message to up to 5 pre-defined numbers. The message text can also be customized. After setting up the feature, all you need in case of an emergency is to press the volume rocker 4 times with the keypad locked to send your cries for help.

The Samsung F480 file browser is a nice upgrade to what the previous Samsung handsets used to offer. It has two tabs - one for the phone memory and another for the memory card, in a layout reminiscent of Nokia smartphones. There are folders for different types of files - images, video, sounds, which allow the handset to sort the memory contents. However, you are not obliged to follow this structure and may place you files around as you wish. There will be no problems handling them.

The functionality of the file browser is one of the best among non-smartphones. You can copy or move files - both one by one or in bulk, and you can create and delete new folders (save for the root ones).

Files can also be sent via Bluetooth or email one by one or in bulk. Throughout the whole file manager, you can pick files you would like to lock to prevent accidental deletion. Having tested quite a few Samsung handsets recently we are now happy to see that the problem with the slow memory card reading seems gone for good. Reading from the memory card is fast enough and this won't bother users at all. Listing thumbnails of the pictures stored in the respective folder on the memory card now happens very quickly.

The Samsung F480 picture gallery is an inherent part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images. You can now copy or move images to any folder of your choice, unlike some older Samsung handsets where only the Images folder was available for that purpose.

There are two view modes for the gallery. In fact those are available throughout the whole file manager but opting between them is only reasonable when browsing pictures. The list view mode presents files as a list, with a really small thumbnail next to each filename. The thumbnail view shows a grid of 3 x 3 thumbs and the filename of the currently selected one is displayed below the grid. You can sort your images (or any other files for that matter) by date, type, name, and size.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next images without having to return to the image list. You can view a picture in both portrait or landscape modes. You can also zoom in on a picture to see greater detail though we must warn you that zooming in and out is quite slow and irritating. This is due to the fact that the zoom steps are rather small and you need to go through quite a lot of them until you are actually able to get more detail.

Here is a sample video so you can see how picture browsing actually works on Samsung F480. The gallery has a real nice interface, even with its problems here and there.

There is another thing to warn you about in the picture gallery. It does have some issues displaying images taken with the phone. When zoomed in they look as if the handset is not capable of displaying all the image colors and severe banding is visible. This means that instead of displaying a nice smooth color gradients where this is necessary large uniform colored spots appear. Those photos look ok when downloaded to a PC or any other device, so no worries about this being problem of the camera.

The music player of Samsung F480 has also been improved and optimized for touch operation. It has better looks although the functionality isn't changed. Not that it needs to, as the player is capable of doing almost anything you can ask for.

The music player allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. You can also 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 playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

The widget responsible for controlling the music player is cool, allowing quick access to the full version of the application by a single click only. You can also start, stop and alternate tracks straight from the home screen if you prefer. A well deserved pat on the shoulder also goes to the FM radio widget.

There are a number of sound effects available when playing a track. Starting with surround, adding dynamic sound and finishing with some common equalizers (rock, jazz etc.), it's all there with Samsung F480. Not that we are such great fans of those sound effects but they are still worth mentioning.

Finally, the Samsung F480 allows touch-performed fast forwarding and rewinding, as well as track rating. Add all those extras to the generous 228MB of internal storage and the memory card slot, and you get a great portable music player.

We shouldn't also forget that Samsung F480 is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The RDS itself is the most advanced one we have seen on a mobile phone, displaying the station name on one row and the additional information on the other. Furthermore, the Samsung F480 radio offers intuitive controls and it even has an integrated music recognition feature much like Sony Ericsson's TrackID. We tried it once and it had no problem returning the right result for us.

The video player is the only multimedia part of Samsung F480 that somewhat disappointed us. Not that it's that bad in terms of user interface or something. 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 second of your video.

What really bothered us is the limited compatibility. Samsung F480 was unable to play a VGA video at 30 fps taken with the camera of a Nokia N95 8GB. The "resolution unsupported" error was very bad news to us as it means that you would have to convert any video you want to watch on your F480. A real pity, as the large screen provides for good video watching experience. However, it is doubtful if anyone will be patient enough to convert a lot of videos for this purpose.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide information about the audio quality of Samsung F480. Our unit had a problem, which made producing accurate results impossible. From what we have seen so far by Samsung, we don't doubt that the final result will be worth it.

Samsung F480 equipped with a 5 megapixel camera with a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. It also has a LED flash, but it's rather inadequate and you shouldn't probably count on it too much.

The camera interface has been tweaked both in terms of looks and functionality with Samsung F480. We find it to be the most convenient camera interface on a touchscreen device so far. All the widely advertised features of Samsung cameraphones are here. Wide dynamic range, face detection, anti-shake, you name it. The face detection feature does not work nearly as reliably as on Samsung U900 Soul but is still performing on a good general level.

In terms of image quality however there are white balance issues, which we are hoping will be fixed in the final version of the handset. A very strong red tint appears on the photos as a result of wrong white balance settings. We tried shooting at different settings but none of the available managed to get rid of the red tint. However fixing the white balance of a camera is the easiest software fix a company can do and we believe that Samsung will solve this problem - after all we had a beta unit for reviewing.

We are not however so certain about the other disadvantage of the camera: its speed. It takes about 5 seconds to save a picture and that is by far not the fastest time on the market. On the other hand the pictures might just be worth the wait.

The Samsung F480 image processing algorithm is quite well worked out, noise brought to a very low level without sacrificing much detail. The pictures look smooth and the dynamic range is surprisingly good for a cameraphone of this size. Highlights and/or shadow-clipping were very rarely seen, except for the red channel which was sometimes clipped but that is due to the white balance issue we mentioned. Once it is fixed, it would be safe to conclude that this is the best camera mounted on a phone of such modest dimensions and truly one of the most capable on the market.

It is more than obvious that Samsung have improved the image quality of their cameras recently. Only a short time ago we saw the Samsung U900 Soul perform better than the N95 8GB in our impromptu shootout and now the F480 brings another pleasant surprise.

Here are the sample pictures we took with the phone so you can see for yourselves.

The video recording capabilities of Samsung F480 aren't really spectacular. It captures videos in QVGA resolution at 30fps. This might have been a decent achievement about a year ago but now it is getting obsolete. After all, the LG Viewty is able to do 120fps in QVGA resolution. Numbers speak for themselves, don't they?

Bothered by the red tint? Here is then how the photos are looking after the white balance was corrected with a picture editing application. No other changes have been made. Not bad, is it?

The video recording capabilities of Samsung F480 aren't really spectacular. It captures videos in QVGA resolution at 30fps. This might have been a decent achievement about a year ago but now it is getting obsolete. After all, the LG Viewty is able to do 120fps in QVGA resolution. Numbers speak for themselves, don't they?

With Samsung F480 you can count on 3G with HSDPA speed and GPRS for browsing internet on the go. EDGE is also present as a handy back-up for browsing in areas where 3G network is missing.

In addition to the network connectivity options, Samsung F480 also offers seamless USB connectivity. Upon connecting, one of the three modes gets activated. You can also opt for the handset prompting you every time to select which profile should be used.

Finally, there are also a memory card slot and Bluetooth support. The A2DP profile is also covered, which means that you can listen to your favorite tracks on a stereo Bluetooth handset. A notable enhancement to the Bluetooth File Browser service is the ability to make certain files or folders visible or invisible based on your needs.

The only significant connectivity feature that Samsung F480 lacks is Wi-Fi. This however is not really surprising as non-smartphones with Wi-Fi are rarer than Eskimos in the desert.

Samsung F480 features a great web browser, which makes surfing a really enjoyable experience. Except for a few minor problems here and there, the browser is truly worth the praise.

The web browser has two view modes. The desktop page rendering makes the pages appear as on a common desktop PC. Its main problem is that, when reading text, you have to endlessly scroll around as it usually doesn't fit on the screen. The smart-fit mode however is an entirely different story. It makes the pages fit perfectly on the 2.8" QVGA screen and reading is greatly improved. In addition to that you can go for either fullscreen or normal mode when in web browser. The former is using the ample display even better and it did win our appreciation.

The other thing we really liked in the web browser is the usage of the volume rocker for changing page size. The sharp performance of that feature was what won our approving nods in the first place. The web browser of Samsung F480 also offers Page pilot - a nice kind of mini map that allows quick navigation of vast and elaborate web pages. Thumbs-up again for the smooth and fast performance, which is superior to most other touch-operated devices.

Finally, you can scroll around by simply sweeping a finger across the screen. The movement is however rather illogical, as the page moves in the same direction as the sweep. We prefer the Apple iPhone implementation, where the page moved in the opposite direction, as if you are actually pushing it to the side. Here is a quick video demonstrating the capabilities of the web browser.

Samsung F480 has a lot of time-management applications and all of them are easy to use and quite efficient. But first thing first, let's see about the calendar. Samsung F480's 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: appointment, anniversary, holiday, important and private. You can store up to 100 schedules, 50 anniversaries, 50 holidays, 20 important, 20 private events.

Alarm setting is also a great part of Samsung F480's interface. You can set up to 11 alarms, each with a variety of configurable options - snooze time, repetition, etc. The name on each alarm can also be altered, save for the "Wake-Up" alarm. 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 and a unit converter. There are also a memo and a to-do application for taking down notes. A countdown timer and a stopwatch will probably seem appealing to the sport-minded users. The voice recorder records in .amr format and has a sixty-minute recording limitation much like the Samsung F490.

The calculator of Samsung F480 is pretty nice. You have all the numbers and the most common mathematical operations on the screen. You can access some more complicated functions through the menus. Finally, there is a shortcut from the calculator to the converter which might be useful if you want to convert your final calculations from a given unit to another.

Samsung F480 comes with an office documents viewer that supports Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. It's an application produced by Access and, apart from the somewhat slow speed, is a nice addition to the Samsung F480 software package. The documents viewer is quick enough when opening files, however zooming is rather annoying. It can also work in landscape mode, which makes reading easier with less panning.

It's not too often that we are so impressed with a handset as we are with Samsung F480. The little fella is an extremely capable device carrying a serious feature pack. In addition, it is so suave and compact that it is bound to earn itself quite a lot of fans. User-friendliness is also among its definite strong points. Some users might miss the Armani logo for the frill of it but we for one won't really grieve over it.

5 megapixel camera, 2.8" touchscreen display and HSDPA ring the right bells in the tech-freaks' minds. Those are however hardly the people to go for Samsung F480. After all, there are still one or two absences in its specs sheet.

Instead, the F480 is targeted at people that want a good all-round device, which won't tear a whole in their pocket. With the camera white balance fixed in the retail version, which seems imminent, Samsung F480 will also be a tempting purchase for the cameraphone lovers.

Samsung F110 is not revolutionary. And no, it's not a high-end gadget either. But it's part of a unique workout system developed by Adidas. The Adidas miCoach system makes your phone a full-fledged workout sidekick recording each of your steps and guiding you along your sports endeavors while playing your favorite music to make sweating a bit more pleasant.

Beside that, Samsung F110 also sports a 2 megapixel camera, FM radio, stereo Bluetooth and 1GB of onboard memory - it's all there to make your personal sports coach that much useful in your everyday life when you are not on the track. You are more than welcome to join us as we take the Samsung 110 out for a jog.

Dedicated sports features:

On-board miCoach application measuring sports progress and giving voice feedback

Synchronization with miCoach web-based coaching system

Built-in accelerometer with step counter

Stride sensor and heart rate sensor in the extended package

Comes with sports headset, 3.5mm audio jack remote and an armband

2 megapixel camera

1GB of onboard storage

FM radio

Stereo Bluetooth

Works without a SIM card inserted

Boring design

Camera has no autofocus

Poor display resolution and poor sunlight legibility

Built-in step counter is really inaccurate

No memory card slot

No 3G

No office documents viewer

Adidas is not new to computer-based running. Back in the mid-1980s they were making headlines with their Micropacer running shoes. There was a built-in microprocessor in the tongue of one shoe, linked to a sensor in the sole. The runner needed to input the length of their stride and some other data, which helped the microprocessor calculate distance, average speed and calories burned. A LED on the tongue of the shoe displayed all the data plus elapsed time. The Micropacer running shoes were being sold for around $100, which back then was a preposterous sum to spend on trainers.

Archrivals Puma had their own geeky running shoes too. For about $200 you would get the Puma RS Computer running shoes along with an Apple II personal computer, a connecting cable and some software to record and analyze all the data for you and present it graphically.

Back to modern day, a popular digital training system is the Nike +. It includes Nike+ ready shoes, Nike+ iPod Sport Kit and an iPod nano. You put the wireless sensor in the sole of your Nike+ shoe and you plug the wireless receiver with your iPod nano. And off you go running and listening to music and live feedback with your running stats. Once you are done, you sync your iPod nano with the Nike+ server and you can see how you did. Plus, you can see how you stack up against all those other runners in the Nike+ community.

The Adidas miCoach system is rather similar, but with a few enhancements. You don't need special Adidas shoes, the stride sensor is easy to fit on the laces of every running shoe on the market. Next, you have a heart rate monitor, something that the Nike+ system lacks. Both the stride sensor and the HRM sensor transmit the data to the Adidas miCoach phone wirelessly. And finally, the last part of the miCoach system is the Samsung F110 mobile phone. It doubles as a music player and it also gives real-time feedback on your running stats. Once you get home, you simply sync it with the miCoach website and see how you did. You can also load a new workout tailored specifically to your profile.

Speaking of the Samsung F110 mobile phone, it obviously will be the focus of our review. After all, mobile phones are our line of business. But for your reading pleasure, we will be covering the miCoach system too. So sit back and pop your slippers on, but keep them trainers at hand, ready for some digital jogging across the pages to come right after this short jump.

The Samsung F110 Adidas phone measures 101.5 x 45 x 14.5 mm. There's nothing ground-breaking in those dimensions but it's a rather compact fella. It would be produced in a number of colors - Dark Gray, Tech Silver, Pink Red, Cool Gray, Sapphire Blue, Misty Blue and Sweet Pink, so you have a lot of options here.

The front panel is dominated by the 2" TFT display and the large D-pad with rough surface. Now about that display - the two-incher is not small by today's feature phone standards, but it sports the somewhat low resolution of 176 x 220 pixels. We are so used to QVGA displays nowadays, that anything less than that seems like having "cheap" written all over the place.

Above the display there is an earpiece and you will also notice the Samsung and Adidas co-branding.

Now, below the display there is the large D-pad and a whole bunch of controls. The D-pad itself has a rough surface just so you know it's a sports gadget before anything else. Thanks to sheer size, it's rather comfortable to work with.

Around it there are two context keys, two shortcut keys - for the Music player and the miCoach menu, the C correction key and finally the red and green receiver keys (which are anything but green and red here).

The alphanumeric keys are large and comfortable, but one thing made quite a bad impression. When pressed they feel like really cheap plastic and even give out squeaking sounds.

On the right-hand side of the Samsung F110 Adidas phone there is only one key and it starts the camera upon a longer press. By the way, you can use the camera with the slider both opened and closed. However, this camera key is rather inconveniently placed. While using the volume rocker on the opposite side we ended up turning on the camera more than often. Moreover, it's quite awkward to use as a shutter key when taking photos.

On the left-hand side you will find the volume rocker and the universal connectivity port. The universal port is the usual Samsung type that they have been using in their latest handsets. This is the place where you connect the charger, the stereo headset and the optional data cable.

The volume rocker is nice to use as it has the same rough surface as the D-pad, which helps tactility a lot.

The bottom and top panels of the Samsung F110 Adidas are bereft of controls.

The back of the Adidas miCoach phone, as it's otherwise known, has some rough rubbery coating that provides for a non-slip grip and is pleasant to touch. The Samsung and Adidas logos again remind you that you are holding a unique handset.

In the upper part of the back panel you can see the loudspeaker, the 2-megapixel camera lens and the self-portrait mirror.

Removing the battery cover is easy - it goes away with a slide. This reveals the Samsung 800mAh Li-Ion battery. We don't have the official figures on expected standby and talk times, however we were pretty satisfied with the actual performance. With low to moderate usage it can keep the phone going for no less than four days and we suppose it is even capable of more.

When you see the Samsung F110 Adidas phone in hand it does strike you as a compact phone. And although we don't have the official figure on weight, it's rather light too.

Backlighting with the Samsung F110 was excellent. All the keys are backlit in white and they are perfectly legible in the dark.

We did have serious problems with display legibility under direct sunlight. Unless the preinstalled white theme is selected, the user interface is totally illegible when the sun hits hard. We suppose that would prove even a more serious drawback, when you are out on the track trying to see your running stats or change the current playlist.

Samsung F110 Adidas has interface similar to most other handsets by the manufacturer. It offers several graphical transitions and animations but is nothing special really.

The stand-by display can offer either the proprietary dynamic Home screen or a still image as wallpaper. The step counter can be visualized on the stand-by screen but only if you opt for the image wallpaper.

The main menu consists of a 4 x 3 grid of icons. There are no colors here and it's rather gloomy. You can change the theme, but all the available ones follow the same pattern. In fact, it seems all the themes have been created to suit the different colors the Adidas phone. The white one is best for using under direct sunlight. The standard black one is totally illegible with the sun beating down.

The phonebook of the Samsung F110 Adidas can store up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields. It displays the names from the phone memory only or all names from both the phone memory and the SIM card at once. Over 20 fields of information are available for each contact.

As expected, signal reception with the Samsung F110 Adidas phone was flawless. Of course if you are out there running, you won't have problems hearing an incoming call thanks to the wired headset. For every other situation the loudspeaker should prove loud enough.

Here is how the Samsung F110 stacks up against some of the other handsets we've measured in our speakerphone loudness test.

Samsung F110 Adidas can handle SMS, MMS, and email. Naturally, a T9 dictionary is present and it does its job quickly and intuitively. Incoming messages, like calls, can also be blocked based on a user-defined black list.

The email client is relatively good but it doesn't support SSL so is useless with Gmail.

The Samsung Adidas file browser is pretty much standard for Samsung handsets. Since there is no memory card slot, there is only the 1GB worth of integrated storage at your disposal. There are folders for different types of files - images, video, music, sounds, which allow the handset to sort the memory contents. You can copy or move files freely and you can create and delete folders.

The picture gallery is an inherent part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening the Images folder. You can view the pictures as a plain list or as a list with thumbnails. And again, you can sort files by date, type, name, and size. You can view pictures in both portrait and landscape.

The available 1GB storage should be enough to use the Samsung Adidas phone as a portable music player - in fact it's one of the main skills to look for in a track sidekick.

The Music player has a dedicated shortcut on the keypad and 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.

While the Samsung F110 Adidas doubles as music player during your workouts you can rest assured that you are enjoying high quality audio reporduction. It offers better audio quality than most of the handsets we've tested so far. That is why we decided to compare it with an Apple iPod in our audio quality test. You will see that they have rather similar frequency response curves - the reason behind this is that Apple are actually using music chips made by Samsung.

As with most Samsung handsets, the retail box will supply you with a wired headset that comes with a microphone and a remote control. This time around, the remote control serves as a 3.5 mm audio jack adapter so you can use own pair of headphones.

Music is easily transferred to the Samsung F110. When you connect the F110 via the optional data cable, choose either miCoach/Media player connection mode, or Mass storage connection mode. The first one allows the F110 to sync with your Windows Media Player music library using the MTP protocol. If you don't use Windows Media Player, the second mode would allow you to simply paste a music folder onto the F110 storage memory, which unfortunately is only 1GB.

The Samsung F110 comes complete with an FM radio. It has original interface with a virtual knob that you control with your D-pad to find stations. There is no support for RDS but you can record radio broadcasts as you please.

The video player 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.

The Samsung F110 Adidas makes use of a 2 megapixel snapper with a maximum image resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. It doesn't have auto focus, or a flash of any kind.

The camera interface is intuitive and follows the current trend of displaying settings with icons in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen, while options appear as popup menus. The settings are extensive and include picture size, shooting mode (single, multi-shot, mosaic shot and panorama), color effects (black and white, negative, sepia, etc.), white balance, and ISO (up to 400).

The camera interface operates in landscape mode and the viewfinder uses the whole screen.

Finally, we come to the video recording capabilities of the camera. Samsung F110 shoots video in the so-called Camcorder mode. The user interface of the camcorder doesn't differ from the one of the still camera except for the available options.

The Samsung F110 Adidas is quite an underdog when it comes to video recording. Its capabilities max out at QCIF resolution at 12 fps. At least videos are recorder in MPEG4 format rather than 3GP. 

Nevertheless, we are not publishing QCIF video samples for quite some time now.

With the Samsung F110 you can count on EDGE and GPRS for browsing internet on the go. The NetFront 3.4 web browser is excellent for a feature phone - it renders pages well, with or without the Smart-Fit function. It offers a mini-map so you know where you are on large pages, and it even has a virtual mouse pointer, which highlights the currently active hyperlink or field.

However the Samsung F110 is slow to pan and scroll to the extent it becomes tedious to work with. Plus the low resolution does pay a penalty here.

The phone works seamlessly when transferring data to and from a PC. The USB connection has PC Studio, miCoach/Media player, Mass storage and Printer modes. Each of them can be set as default, otherwise the user will be prompted for action upon connection.

The Samsung F110 calendar offers three views - daily, weekly and monthly. There are five types of events available: appointment, anniversary, holiday, important, and private. The number of alarm slots is also five, 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.

Among the other offerings are the voice memo recorder, a world time application, a calculator, and a unit converter. A countdown timer and a stopwatch are also available. They are the regular well-known applications - nothing fancy, never mind the sporty spirit of the Samsung F110 Adidas.

We were let down to find no office documents viewer in the Samsung Adidas phone. It's a feature we've seen in so many Samsung handsets we would've thought it to be default by now.

When it comes to games, Samsung F110 is quite well geared. A whole bunch of games are preinstalled just waiting for you to have some free time to spend. The games that the Samsung F110 bundles up are Cannonball, Forgotten Warrior, Freekick, Arch Angel, Midnight Pool (trial), Minigolf Las Vegas (trial), Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest (trial), Tetris Mania (trial) and Asphalt 2 (trial).

You've probably seen every one of them on other Samsung handsets.

The new Adidas miCoach sports system sounds rather easy. You need to put two sensors on. The heart rate monitor straps on your chest after you've sprayed it with water, and the stride sensor gets fixed on your shoe laces.

It's recommended that the first time you use the system, you make an assessment run. It's actually the only workout to find preset in the miCoach menu of your Adidas phone when you take it out of the box. The goal in the Assessment run is to run 1.6 km (1 mile, right) as fast as you can. Not that you should get yourself a heart attack on the track if you are an inexperienced user. Take it easy and do as good as you can - you can even walk if you want to.

When you are done, grab a bottle of water, set up an account at www.micoach.com, download their synchronizing software and connect the Samsung F110 Adidas via the optional data cable.

Now, synchronizing is automatic so you don't have to worry about that. Once all the data from the Assessment run is uploaded, the system evaluates your fitness level and will adjust workouts to your level.

Next thing you got to do is pick a running goal. That's what it's all about with the Adidas miCoach system - goals. You can opt for one of the already preset goals - "Learn to run", "Get fit, stay fit", "Lose weight", "Run a race", "Improve performance". Once you pick a goal for yourself, the miCoach center creates a running program for you and uploads it to your phone's miCoach calendar.

If you are not happy with the available goals and you know what you are doing, you can create custom workouts based on preset time, distance, pace, burned calories, intervals, stride rate, or step count.

And finally, if that is not enough for you, you can use the challenges system. It simply allows you to put occasional challenges for yourselves to: "Burn calories", "Run faster", "Run longer", or "Run more often". Unfortunately, the last one doesn't involve a mean bloke coming to your place and literally kicking you out to the track, so in the end it's all up to your will.

Now beside all that stuff, the miCoach system gives you super detailed stats on your running sessions (getting tired of the word "workout" already?).

Plus it presents you the same miCoach calendar that is available on your miCoach phone that also helps you plan your runs.

So that's it - at least as far as the online miCoach center is concerned. When you are out on the track, or the road, the street or the beach (lucky you!) - wherever it is that you like to jog, it all boils down to you and your personal training sidekick - the miCoach phone. So let's give it all our attention.

The miCoach shortcut key below the display launches the miCoach menu. It includes items such as start, workout calendar, workouts, music player, workout photos, and settings. The music player can be accessed from here. You can pick special songs as your motivation songs - they kick in, when you start falling off your target heart rate zone during running.

Before anything else you should set up you physical profile and preferences. You should also set up the connection with the heart rate monitor and the stride sensor.

You can also set up the voice guidance system that acts as your personal coach while you are running. You can have the system read out the run stats at preset intervals or you can invoke it by tapping the phone twice. When you do that the built-in accelerometer kicks in and the miCoach voice reads out all the details that you consider important - time, distance, calories, pace, stride rate, and heart rate.

Now when it comes to heart rate, you can choose how you want it described. The system can tell you either the exact beats-per-minute or the name of the heart rate zone you are in, or even simpler - the color of the zone. There are four zones in total:

blue or energy zone (that's 65-75% of your maximum heart rate)

green or endurance zone (that's 75-85% of your maximum heart rate)

yellow or strength zone (that's 85-90% of your maximum heart rate)

red or power zone (that's 90-95% of your maximum heart rate)

Those of you that know something about running should already have an idea what running in each of these zones means. For the rest of you, well, log on to www.micoach.com and educate yourselves.

You can also choose whether the built-in pedometer in the Samsung F110 should be operating. Truth be told, it's a rather inaccurate thingy and its impact on your running stats is zilch, so you would be better off without it. The stride sensor on your running shoe will do just fine.

Another interesting feature of the miCoach menu is the capability to create your custom workouts just like you would at the miCoach website but without the need for a computer. You create those based on preset time, distance, pace, burned calories, intervals, stride rate, or step count. Here is how an interval workout called Sprints looks like (the various colors are your target heart rate zone for the selection):

Now your next weapon in your miCoach arsenal is the Workout calendar. It's good to plan your workouts ahead - that usually motivates you not to miss trainings. You will see days marked with different colors - they again are based on heart rate zones colors.

The Calendar is also the place where history is found.

When you've finished browsing all those options, it may be high time you went running (at least that's what we did). The running interface of the miCoach system differs according to the type of workout you have chosen.

If you want to see the other current stats for that run, simply press left or right on the D-pad. Unfortunately there are no sensors connected at the moment this shot was taken.

If you are taking a distance-based run, such as the Assessment run for example, the interface might look something like that. There is 1.61 km to go, and none has been covered. The circle starts filling when you cover a certain distance.

As far as distance calculation is concerned, the miCoach phone uses the stride sensor. In the beginning it might seem a bit inaccurate, but after you run your first 800 m with it, it's guaranteed to catch up.

Now if you are to go for a free run for example, the interface also might look something like this. Now, that actually is an official photo but it should give you a clue. You can see the different colors of the heart rate zones. They change according to your current heart rate.

So that's about the miCoach in general. It's all that we can show you briefly. We are sure that if you have the opportunity to work out with the Samsung F110 Adidas phone, you would find many other ways to have fun with it - just you, the track and your personal coach.

When compared to the existing digital sports systems such as the Nike+, the Adidas miCoach phone has a number of strong points - the heart-rate monitor, the free choice of running shoes, the mobile phone functionality, the "double-tap-to-get-stats" feature, and the FM radio.

However, the iPod nano used by Nike has larger storage space, higher resolution display, better sunlight legibility and it's more compact.

But we are in no position to evaluate running systems, so we'll leave that to the sports blogs. As far as we are concerned, the Samsung F110 Adidas phone is a capable device, which delivers almost everything that's promised with little or no compromise.

But by just looking at its specs sheet, it's outright obvious that it's a budget model. An equivalent Samsung handset without the sports functionality would cost you 150 euro or less, while the Samsung F110 Adidas phone would presumably retail for around 250 euro without the two sensors, and around 400 euro for the full package.

Sounds a bit much for that kind of handset, but you should remember that $100 for a pair of microprocessor trainers did sound outrageous back in the 1980s too.

Successful or not, the Samsung F110 Adidas phone will remain a niche phone and you are unlikely to see much of it on phone-shop windows.