Managing to recapture Samsung’s former glory days, the E900 is one of the more impressive phones out at the moment. It manages to do everything the rival LG Chocolate does, combined with better specifications and a cheaper price. Using the same touch sensitive design as the formerly mentioned Chocolate, the Samsung E900 was released shortly after LG’s attempt to have a ‘different’ phone on the market. Whilst both are slide phones, the E900 comes out top in every way.

As mentioned, the E900 is ‘touch sensitive’. What this means is that the top part of the handset responds to heat so there are no buttons to be pressed, the top half simply responds to a gentle tap. This takes some getting used to, especially since the numerical keypad is simply standard buttons, however after a while this becomes second nature. The phone has a nifty little feature though; when a call is received the touch sensitive pad switches off to avoid being activated by the heat radiating from your face.

Samsung have also taken a step forward and revamped their menu system, ditching the bright blue and white colour scheme from their previous models. The menu now comes in black or white with much more modern icons. The layout is exactly the same, however Samsung have added a nice feature which allows you to see and select what is shown on the next menu screen simply by highlighting the relevant heading. For example, when scrolling through the menu to “sound settings”, a little window appears with everything that is listed under this heading. This enables you to look through the next screen without actually entering it, although this is obviously still possible. With enough use it is possible to quickly navigate through the menus and change options with a few clicks of the keypad.

In terms of size, the E900 is a lightweight 93g packed in to a 93 x 45 x 16.5 mm frame. Into this small package, Samsung have seen fit to attach 80MB of onboard memory and a MicroSD slot, allowing the phone to scale heights the D500 could never manage. To make use of this fantastic memory, Samsung’s E900 has a 2 megapixel camera and an MP3 player. 80MB of memory isn’t a huge amount, so if you’re to be using this primarily as an MP3 device, a memory card is a worthwhile investment.

Samsung’s traditional drawback of not allowing MP3s to be used as message tones is still annoyingly present in this model, however the handset does allow MP3s to be used as ringtones – a feature present on any phone with one of these players. The sound quality is good, although not as good as the Sony Walkman models. One strange hangover from other Samsung models is the way the phone can only ring or vibrate but not both at the same time.

Be sparing with the MP3 player though, because the battery life on the Samsung isn’t fantastic. Only 3.5 hours of talktime are available here, so users wishing to purchase this phone for its MP3 capabilities could be let down when the time comes to make a call, especially if music is playing constantly. A possible reason for the low talktime is the inclusion of the touch sensitivity, which is a tremendous drain on battery power. It's worth noting that the charging socket has changed again and owners of the previous D500 or D600 models won't be able to use chargers from their old mobiles with the E900.

The TFT LCD screen displays all images perfectly, also allowing video playback and recording on the device. The 262k colour screen also means that all 2 megapixel images will be displayed in fantastic quality, and can be transferred between devices through the now standard Bluetooth. The E900 is a Tri band GMS 900 / 1800 / 1900 phone so it should be good for holiday travel plus it has data support with Edge capability.

Finally, for those of you not interested in a standard black phone, it is now available in pink on both pay and go and contract platforms. For only £149.99, you could do a lot worse than Samsung’s latest attempt to match the D500.

Review by - Scott Goodacre

Published - 01/11/2006

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