Samsung F480 review: Touchdown!

The organizer is great

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.

Calendar view modes and some of the available 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.

Tons of alarm slots and customization options are available with Samsung F480

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.

Voice recorder • World clock • Unit converter

Timer and Stopwatch

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.

The calculator is great

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.

Document viewer is way too slow with Samsung F480

Final words

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.

"...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..."

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Finally, the people who see handsets as web-browsing devices should also have a look at Samsung F480 before buying their next phone. HSDPA combined with the great web browser make web-browsing a great experience and, if it wasn't for the missing Wi-Fi, it would probably be in the top three handsets in this respect.

Samsung F480 is expected to hit the shelves on May 19th and - take our word - you might just want to wait until then before you fork out the cash on your next handset.