Samsung P310 review: Style, chromium and leather

Seamless work with MS Office documents

As usual in mobiles, the basic organizing application in Samsung P310 is its calendar. It is very well elaborated, which proves the long-term experience of this manufacturer in this particular area. The calendar offers a month, week, and day view; the week could start on either Monday or Sunday. You can insert three various event types in the calendar - meeting, anniversary and task – and up to 100 items of each type. Each event type can be alerted of in a preset period in advance, while meetings can even be repeated daily, weekly or monthly. The calendar also features a task manager. Tasks can be separately visualized, given priority, and marked off once completed. Synchronization with MS Outlook runs without problems.

 
Month, week, and day view at the calendar

There are three alarm clocks in Samsung P310. They will wake you up with any sound stored in the phone, even if it is switched off. The days the alarms are active are user-configurable as well. The phone fits in 100 text notes, each of which can contain no more than 100 characters. Among other organizing functions you will also find a good calculator, a voice recorder limited to one hour of recording time, a world time application, a unit converter, a countdown timer, and a stopwatch with four intervals.

The final version of Samsung P310 will not contain a „mobile stopwatch", but an alarm clock only

The phone features a viewer for documents in DOC, XLS, PPT and PDF formats, which is a very useful but rather rare function. Apart from being scrolled by presses on the navigation key each document can be zoomed in or out, turned around to a 90° angle or searched through. When the phone browses a document, it needs a couple of seconds to focus newly visualized parts. Nevertheless, the office viewer works fine in case of emergency and what’s most important – it is present in very few non-OS phones.

Extra applications

Fun: a TV screen instead of a display

Samsung P310 is equipped with a good music player, which organizes files into four playlists; shuffle and repeat functions are also available. The player works with MP3, AAC, and AAC+ formats; it has a good-quality loudspeaker and comes with a standard earphone set, which Samsung attaches to all its models and which we had the chance to test. Music can be listened through stereo earphones via Bluetooth as well. The sound performed by the earphone set in the retail package is not brilliant but is fully sufficient for users with standard expectations. The headset feature a volume control with a microphone and a button for call control and can be therefore used as a handsfree set. Regretfully, it is not possible to connect another, different type of earphones with standard jack. The player offers two more function for sound improvement: an equalizer and stereo widening. There is no FM radio.

Samsung P310 is delivered with earphones whose cable features a microphone

The phone plays videos in 3GP and MP4 formats. Records can be forwarded or watched in a fullscreen mode by pressing the hash key.

 
File manager • viewing files (the title Bluetooth is a mistake originating from the non-final firmware)

A pretty interesting extra here is the option for connection between the phone and a TV through a special cable. This cable, however, is not part of the standard retail package. Once such a connection has been established, you should be able to see the images on the phone display transferred onto the TV screen. Samsung P310 supports PAL and NTSC coding; selection is made from the menu.

Samsung has prepared three Java games for boring moments: the classical Lemmings, a good mini-golf, and the football FIFA 06. All three games feature beautiful graphic design, but playing may not be easy due to the uncomfortable keypad layout. If you prefer other games, you can download them from the Internet, as the phone supports Java 2.0. If you download games via Bluetooth or save them on the memory card, they will not start running afterwards, so be careful. Java in Samsung P310 is quite slow according to the results of the application jBenchmark.

The phone offers three attractive games

jBenchmark results:

• jBenchmark 1.0: 1374 points
• jBenchmark 2.0: 92 points

Data with EDGE

Samsung P310 supports the data transfer technologies GPRS and EDGE, both in Class 10. The absence of UMTS is more or less acceptable even though Samsung P310 is a stylish and quite expensive phone. Nearby devices are connected via Bluetooth 2.0 and through a data connector with a USB cable (the cable is delivered as a standard part of the retail package). There is no Infrared port. To provide synchronization between the phone and a PC you need first to download all the necessary software. We did not find a special software CD in the retail package. When the phone is connected to the phone through the data cable, the memory card does not appear as a new removable device under Windows.

Browsing in the Internet

Samsung P310 has a good web browser, which is even able to show simple Internet pages. Occasionally there are problems with diacritics. You can not only enter addresses directly, but also save favorite pages of yours. WAP visualization counts with 15 lines on the display.

Typing an address in the browser • settings • history

For fashion lovers

Samsung P310 is a highly stylish phone, whose original look sends it up onto the top of the cream among very few competitors. Its main mission is to represent its owner in higher society. In this sense, you should carefully evaluate your needs and state you preferences. If you want a user-friendly, multi-functional phone for common daily use, you’d better search somewhere else as the unpractical layout of Samsung P310’s keypad will cause you numerous problems. The rest of the drawbacks we mentioned in the course of this review are relatively insignificant if not ignorable given the type of public the phone targets.

Currently the Samsung P310 market price is highly competitive for this extraordinary high-end phone.