Samsung U900 Soul preview: First Look

User interface is nicely upgraded

The user interface of Samsung U900 Soul is a slightly improved version of what we saw in the Ultra II line of handsets. It allows greater customization, as even the theme of the touchpad can be modified. You can also create your own theme, tuning every single element to your taste.

The user interface is even better than the one we saw in the Ultra II phones

The preinstalled themes are also very nice and we happened to particularly enjoy the one named Monolithic Purity. It blends greatly with the brushed metal design and benefits the phone looks greatly.

The other two preinstalled themes are fine too

The music player, which is one of the most essential parts of the Samsung U900, has seen little changes when compared to the other Samsung U-models. It allows filtering tracks by author, album, genre or you can 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.

The music player hasn't changed much but it's good enough as it is

The new thing is that, instead of equalizers, you now get to choose between sound effects - 3D-sound, hall effect, etc, which share the list with the usual presets such as Rock, Jazz and so forth.

The Samsung U900 Soul also allows track fading out and changing the visualization of the player. That, combined with the 128MB of internal memory and the card slot, gives the phone every chance of being a more than decent portable music player.

The most interesting part of the new user interface however is the new touch pad. Its icons change across applications and menus to grant quick access to the most frequently used and relevant features.

Touch pad icons: home screen shortcuts • four-way navigation with confirming center • Touchpad goes landscape: camera shortcuts and four-way navigation in camera menu

Some of the other touch pad icons

Camera performance at first look

As we already mentioned, a camera with this kind of specs simply cannot go unnoticed. The Samsung U900 Soul camera interface takes full advantage of the touch pad allowing one-click access to the most frequently used features.

Camera interface

"...The user interface of Samsung U900 Soul is a slightly improved version of what we saw in the Ultra II line of handsets. It allows greater customization, as even the theme of the touchpad can be modified. You can also create your own theme, tuning every single element to your taste..."

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Image quality is worth the praise, at least at first glance. Colors are spot on and sharpness levels are very good. There is no trace of the oversharpening in Samsung G600 we didn't like in our 5 megapixel shootout.

We are even starting to wonder how Samsung U900 Soul will fare against the current reigning duo Nokia N95 8GB / Nokia N82. We are to see about that in our detailed review.

For now we give you some samples for a taster of the image quality the Soul pulls off.

Samsung U900 Soul camera samples

We also need to mention that the face detection feature works great and is able to focus on multiple faces at the same time - something we've not seen on any other mobile phone.

Web browser

The last thing to address in this preview is the web browser. It left somewhat mixed impressions on the GSMArena team.

We are well familiar with the capabilities of the Net Front 3.4 web browser used here and we were disappointed to see the Samsung U900 Soul not using them all. There is no landscape view mode and the page resize feature doesn't work really well. When reducing the size, the font isn't handled properly and any text on the screen becomes compressed to being downright illegible.

Web browser only offers portrait orientation

On the positive side, pages are rendered well in both desktop and Smart-fit view mode. However, as mentioned, this only holds true if you are using the default page size.

First impressions

It seems that Samsung U900 Soul really knows how to make a good first impression. The phone has the looks to get one's attention and the features to keep the excitement alive. The user-friendliness and wide-ranging customization make sure you won't get bored with it too quickly.

We are yet to see if the Samsung U900 Soul has what it takes to live up to its own promises. Our intuition has rarely failed us though, and it's now telling us U900 Soul is fit for market success.