Samsung E800 review: Slide here, slide there

Snooooze

Samsung features three types of alarm. Two of them are named Alarm1 and Alarm2, the third is called Morning call. They differ just by the possibility to postpone the warning at the Morning call, so you can snooze for few more minutes. All three alarms are repetitive and all of them allow you to tick days when the phone alarms you. So if you'll get bored someday, with suitable combination of these alarms you can create a sophisticated system of alarms for the whole week.

Setting the alarms

You're quite limited at alarm melody selection. You can't use all the melodies available, there are only five different tones to choose called Alarm1 - Alarm 5, what an imagination :)

The calendar week still begins with Sunday and you can't do anything about it. It offers you two basic views - monthly and daily and it works with colors, which are used for highlighting days with an event. Events can be of four types - memo, to-do, call, and birthday. You can insert hundred of items in total, twenty-five of each kind. Looking at total memory capacity (22MB) you'll probably ask the same question as I did: why does Samsung save the memory right in the calendar?

Month view of the calendar • event detail

The calculator is quite simple, but besides four basic mathematical operations it can handle also brackets and percents. It prefers multiplication and division to addition and subtraction. Units converter can tell you for example how many square yards is your piece of land large and what is its value in Euro. Countdown timer and stopwatch are the further functions of time organization.

Calculator • units convertor

Pleasure comes before business

You have only two and a half megabytes from total 22MB of memory available for saving Java applications. Producers occupied approximately 400 kB with two pre-installed games - falling color balls (very nice Tetris variation) and a snowball fight. You can download other games, of course.

Connection to the Internet runs via GPRS class 10 (4+2 TS). If the WAP browser is not enough, you can connect the phone to a PC via infrared port or a data cable (not included in standard package). But it's a pity to degrade such a nice phone to a mere modem, don't you think?

Wap browser

Good, but Samsung can do better

Prime advantage of Samsung SGH-E800 will be the design, that's for sure; price will be the prime disadvantage on the other hand. The functions of the phone are sufficient for most of the people and I think that most of the reproaches I wrote in this review won't discourage the common users. Nine out of ten people won't use an email browser or synchronization.

It's a bit different with the video recording possibility. I am sure that also less technical skilled users would use that. Many people would mind the small capacity of calendar, as it's an often-used feature. Approaching the style of the menu to other phones would be also appreciated. Looking at specifications I can't keep from the impression that Samsung can do better. With D410, which I've mentioned many times, Samsung came up with many new features that would be suitable also for the new model. Beginning with the 262k display with very good resolution and ending with e.g. an email client. Samsung E800 really doesn't show off from the functionality point of view. From the software point of view it's the same as last year's E700 model, with the same pros and cons. And that's perhaps a pity.