Samsung S7350 Ultra s review: Sliding into place

Telephony sounds good

Making phone calls with Samsung S7350 was trouble-free, no signal drops or faulty in-call audio for the time of our review.

You can also use the Search as Spelling feature, which appears in the options menu once you type some digits on the homescreen. It's actually Smart Dialing as you've seen it on other handsets. It will look up names that contain the letters corresponding to the numbers you typed.

The Samsung Smart Dial works fine so you'll almost have no need to ever enter the phonebook. The handset checks up both names of the contacts, unlike the U900 which only searched the first names.

We also ran our traditional speakerphone test with the Samsung S7350 Ultra s. Here is how it ranks along some of the other handsets we've measured recently. S7350 Ultra s loudspeaker performance is a step louder than the bar-shaped alternative S7220 Ultra b. You can find more info on the test itself and the other tested handsets here.

Phonebook is well familiar and friendly

The phonebook of Samsung S7350 Ultra s hasn't budged an inch, compared to, say, the U900 Soul. Up to 1000 contacts can be stored with multiple fields. It can display the names on the SIM card, the phone memory or both at once. Searching is done by gradual typing of a contact's name.

The Ultra s phonebook

Quite a number of different information fields are available for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers, 4 email addresses, URLs and so on. Each contact can also be assigned a specific ringtone and a picture, as well as a note. You can even set a video as "caller's image" - a feature that is now becoming pretty common.

Messaging full pack

Samsung S7350 Ultra s handles its messaging duties well. The SMS and MMS share an editor. You can convert SMS to MMS by simply inserting an image or other multimedia content.

SMS and MMS share an editor

There is also a counter at the bottom indicating the number of parts longer messages need to split into for sending.

There is room for storing 500 SMS, 30 push messages, 200 broadcast messages and 30 configuration messages in the phone memory. As far as emails and MMS are concerned, they are not limited in number and storage depends on the free memory only. Incoming messages, like calls, can also be blocked based on a user-defined black list.

The email client is nice and easy to use. It can manage up to five accounts - POP or IMAP; download is user-defined, opting between headers only and entire messages. Any file in the phone memory, as well as business cards, calendar events, tasks or notes can be emailed as attachments. The client can be set up to check mail at a chosen interval (options vary from 30 minutes to 1 day).

The user's emailing needs are well taken care of

File management is great

The Samsung S7350 Ultra s file browser can list all the folders on both the phone memory and the memory card together or one by one. There are folders for different types of files - images, video, music, sounds, which allow the handset to sort the memory contents. However, if you misplace some file, the handset will still handle it.

File browser

The slow card reading that troubled the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH is no issue on the Ultra s - the handset reads memory cards acceptably fast. With almost full larger capacity cards (in the line of 16GB) the initial card initialization takes up to 10 minutes.

That long card initialization is actually starting to bug us. We don't really know about you, but if you are like us, and you swap a lot of cards, all that initial waiting time when you pop in a card, can really get on your nerves. And it's not only the Samsung 7350 - this thing happens with almost all recent Samsungs that we've tested.