Samsung i620 review: Whiter shade of pale

Windows Mobile as usual

The i620 runs on the same TI OMAP 1710 (200 MHz) processor as the Samsung i600. It has 64MB of RAM for running processes and there are 80MB of shared storage memory. However only 34MB of those 80MB are available to the user. Thankfully, the phone has a microSD memory expansion slot.

Memory details

The good old Windows Mobile Standard in its 6.0 edition is what you get with Samsung i620. With the very familiar user interface and options, the only thing to note is the absence of any proprietary homescreen plug-in. Not much of a deal-breaker, but the ones in i600 and i780 were a welcome perk.

Customizing the home screen is available through the seven preinstalled themes. Samsung Living world home screen layout is animated one which varies depending on your location. The other is Windows Simple, Default or Basic and the Samsung add-ons Simple, Calendar and Tab home screen layouts.

Samsung Living World • Windows Default • Samsung Calendar • the available layouts in i620

The Samsung Tab layout is also very handy, as it brings to the home screen all the necessary access to the main stuff of the phone just at a few clicks away.

Other thing you can change in the interface is the color scheme with six of them available - Default, Windows Mobile Green, and Guava Bubbles as well as Samsung Blue, Purple and Violet schemes.

The Samsung Tab layout is useful

We had a nice and clear conversation with Dexter. Samsung i620 has no issues with reception and in-call voice quality. The pair of loudspeakers on the back produce audible and crisp sound.

Calling Dexter on Samsung i620

Here is how the handset ranks among some of the other handsets we've measured in our speakerphone loudness test. You can find more information about the test itself here.

Samsung i620 has an unlimited contact list with a plethora of available fields for each entry. Synchronization with MS Outlook is textbook.

There is a practical additional field to each contact - the "Last call". It displays the number and the time the contact in question was last called. A full log is available of calls to and from numbers belonging to this contact, as well as call duration and time of call.

The phonebook and some of the available tabs and menus

Sending and receiving messages is done through the centralized Inbox. It has separate folders for SMS, MMS and email. SMS length is virtually unlimited, as well as the memory available for received and sent messages. Inside the multimedia editor you will find the useful option to create multi-page messages containing more than one melody, image or text.

SMS and MMS share one centralized Inbox

The Outlook Mobile email client supports POP3 and IMAP accounts. You can have multiple accounts and you can set the client to automatically check mail at regular time intervals. It has full support for sending and receiving attachments.

Email inbox and reading email

"...In the end - it all boils down to this: the Samsung i620 doesn't offer high-end features but offers excellent implementation of the features that are currently on-board. As such it will have a really hard time coping with Symbian bullies out there..."

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An average 2 megapixel camera

We've no reason to doubt Samsung's cameraphone skill. But when it comes to cameras in smartphones, especially the i620, the results are not so encouraging. The 2 megapixel autofocus camera produces passable images. Color rendering suffers a pinch of excessive green, The exposure and the contrast are correct, but it looks like the noise reduction was overused - there is no visible noise in the images, which is good, but a lot of fine detail is lost during the process.

Sample photos of the i620 camera

The camera menu is easy to operate. It uses traditional window structure of the menus. The camera produces images of maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels with four quality settings. White balance can be either automatic or custom set to daylight, cloudy, tungsten or fluorescent. You can apply a few color effects (Black and white, Sepia and Negative) and use the special camera modes such as multi or night shot.

A nice feature is the mosaic shooting mode. It produces 4 successive images at 1280 x 1024 pixels taken in one-second intervals. The four images are then displayed in a grid layout making up one mosaic photo. We tried that feature on some portrait shots making funny faces and the result was quite amusing.

Some of the camera settings

The video recorder interface is no different than the still camera. Video clips are recorded in QVGA or QCIF resolution at 15fps in 3GP format. Quality is barely passable. For those interested in the details, an average 30-sec clip has is about 1.5MB in size. The complete data is as follows: AAC mono at 8.000kHz, 15 fps and 128 kbps data rate.

Here is a Samsung i620 sample video.

The Picture gallery opens as a 2 x 4 grid of thumbs. The currently selected image appears a bit bigger. Zooming in on an image is effortless with the help of the rotating wheel. The process involves no visible delays.

Picture gallery and a selected image

The Document viewer can open Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF files. Of course it's only a viewer, you cannot edit the documents.

The Document viewer

The accessories folder holds applications like Adobe Flash Lite 2.1 player, Calculator, Smart converter, Smart search, Stopwatch, and Task manager.

Accessories folder contents

Except for the traditional calendar under applications, the Organizer folder houses the other related stuff -Alarms, the D-day application (used for putting down tasks), voice notes and world clock.

Organizer and its applications

Samsung have also incorporated a stand-alone JAVA launcher with 3D support. It's way better than the clumsy Java installation process using the internet browser, seen in Samsung i600.

Data transfers

Samsung i620 is not as well geared as the Samsung i600, let alone i780. The wired connectivity in i620 is ensured by the proprietary USB connector for synchronization with MS Outlook. Wireless synchronization via Bluetooth is impossible, as the phone does not support BISS (Bluetooth information Synchronization Service). A2DP support allows listening music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.

Speaking of wireless communication, we should mention again there is no Wi-Fi at your disposal.

The tri-band phone supports GPRS, EDGE and HSDPA (1.8 Mbps) so you always have data connectivity options available.

Softwarewise Samsung i620 offers an Internet Explorer Mobile web browser, as well as the Opera Mobile 8.65. The Opera browser is a downright favorite with tab browsing and several viewing options. You can have it fit the text to the screen, show everything in one column or show the website as it is. Fullscreen mode is also at hand. Hardcore Internet Explorer mobile users can of course use it as the default browser.

Internet services also include a separate Podcast client and an RSS Reader.

The IE browser and some of the menus options

Conclusion

Samsung i620 is a stylish (to some!), neat and relatively compact slider phone, plus it runs on Windows Mobile 6 Standard. The full QWERTY hardware keyboard brings even more functionality to the smartphone. The sensor keys and the useful D-pad wheel help a lot when dealing with the address book, the menus and especially with the gallery images.

Interestingly enough, even before the Samsung i620 was out, it has already got a successor in the face of Samsung i640. You can call it a bigger brother if you want. With double the HSDPA download speed and quad band GSM support the main (shall we say, only) improvements, the only thing that can make you consider it are the more moderate looks. Shiny white is not our favorite color - to put it that way.

Truth be told though, the absence of Wi-Fi in both i620 and i640 is one of the major drawbacks of the phone, if not a deal breaker.

In the end - it all boils down to this: the Samsung i620 doesn't offer high-end features but offers excellent implementation of the features that are currently on-board. As such it will have a really hard time coping with Symbian bullies out there.