Samsung F480 preview: First look

User interface is nicely upgraded

Samsung F480 features a new UI, with nice colorful icons. It is a welcome change as previous touch UI Samsung handsets we reviewed seemed a little too reserved. The other nice improvement to the interface is the addition of widgets. We did like the idea and we are glad the implementation didn't let us down.

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

The Home screen and the Widget sidebar

Some of the available Widgets at work

The Widget bar itself includes a number of icons, which can be dragged onto the display and ordered to the user liking. If any of them should become unwanted, they can easily be dragged back to the bar. Here is a quick video demonstration on how the whole widget thing works.

Widgets in action video

Most of the actions throughout the menus also involve animations. We, for one, did find them very eye-pleasing and cool to work with. If we're to sum up the first impression of the user interface, we'd say it's downright fun to use. And it's by far the best looking and best performing Touch UI we've seen in recent handsets (save for the Apple iPhone of course).

Main menu • file manager • dialing pad • task switcher menu

The music player of Samsung F480 has also been improved and optimized for touch operation. It looks very cool but, in terms of functionality, is quite the same as with most other recent Samsungs.

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 playlist. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

Filtering tracks by artist • now playing interface • the music player widget

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.

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 we still needed to mention them.

Samsung F480 music player video

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.

Samsung F480 is also equipped with an FM radio with RDS. Again, it offers intuitive controls and it even has an integrated music recognition feature much like Sony Ericsson's TrackID. We tried it once and it returned the right result straight on.

FM radio interface • song recognition turned out nice