Samsung F300 review: A phone like no other

Have fun listening to music

Samsung F300, as its name Ultra Music reveals, is primarily meant to serve as a music player. Yet, not even in terms of music has it been brought to perfection. There is a music player on the multimedia side of the phone only. It opens and plays MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, and eAAC+ formats. You can listen to music with a minimized music player only if you have switched to the opposite side. For example, it is not possible to listen to music and browse images from the Album simultaneously.

   
Music player • orientation in sub-menus is rather complicated

The music player offers a wide range of setup options, but it contains plenty of submenus, so it will take you some time before you get accustomed to it. There is no doubt that you will have to master the uncomfortable sensor keys, too. Repeat and Shuffle options as well as stereo widening are available. There is an equalizer for sound tuning too. Music files can be sorted by name, artist, album, genre and number of runs. Thanks to the last mentioned criteria the phone can automatically offer a playlist with the most frequently played songs. You can create playlists of your own, of course, but you will surely have hard times naming them because of the not-very-precise sensor button.

 
Songs can be sorted by a number of criteria

The phone takes music files from either the internal phone memory, whose size is approximately 100 MB, or from the memory card (but only if files are located in the folder “Music”, otherwise the phone will not find them). The quality of the original earphones enclosed in the retail package is more or less identical to that of earphones sold with cheap MP3 players. In the middle of the cable of the earphones you will see a tiny box with a microphone, a key for accepting calls, and an antenna for the radio. Right here you can disjoint the cable and plug your own earphones in the standard 3.5 mm jack. Samsung F300 can also produce music via its good quality speaker or into stereo Bluetooth earphones thanks to the available A2DP profile. If the phone is inside its case and both its batteries are fully charged, its music player will manage to constantly play into the earphones at a medium volume level for the unbelievable 35 hours!

   
Earphones are plugged into a connector on the left side of the phone • you can use your favourite earphones as well

Samsung F300 has a FM radio – an essential component for any music phone. All detected stations can be saved into the memory positions available in the phone either manually, or automatically. The radio does not offer RDS service. The last function of the multimedia side worth mentioning is the voice recorder, which is rather similar to the one integrated on the phone side.

Radio main display and its menu • voice recorder is identical to the one on the phone side

No Java support

Samsung F300 does not support Java. After all, games would have been too difficult to play on such a small display, while on the multimedia display control would have been extremely hard, if not impossible.

Equipped with EDGE

Data transfers are backed by GPRS and EDGE both Class 10. For shorter distances you may want to use Bluetooth or a data cable. However, no one could inform us, not even the people from Samsung call center, whether the phone would be delivered with an enclosed data cable or not. According the phone’s menu, Mass Storage should appear as soon as the phone has been connected to a computer. One of the peculiarities in Samsung F300 is the support of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), which allows copying files through Windows Media Player, for example.

WAP browser menu

As soon as you activate the WAP browser, the phone will automatically switch to its multimedia side so that you can enjoy your browsing on a bigger display. Along with other options here you can also deactivate images, sounds, and JavaScript. There are three font sizes to choose from.

For experiment lovers

It is out of question that some of you will like and embrace the idea of a dual face phone. Most of you will soon find out, though, that the originality of such an idea has a cost much too high. Samsung F300?s small size and high-quality keypad with spacey keys are its only advantages. There are far more drawbacks, though: small display, non-ergonomic controls, absence of Java, etc. Above all, Samsung F300 is designed for people who like to be different from the mass and love innovations. In this sequence of thoughts we definitely cannot recommend it to people in need of an easily controlled multimedia phone.

 
Samsung F300 is not a common phone

Samsung F300 is already being sold in Internet stores for approximately 330 euros. The black version showed in our review is expected to be soon followed by colorful and more cheerful models.