imode phones | i-mode phone reviews and comparisons
Samsung S500i
I suppose looks are a matter of taste, but for my money, the Samsung S500i is one ugly phone. I know plenty of you will feel differently, and looks aren’t everything, so I’ll press on. With the release of a new internet platform like i-mode®, it’s more about form than function—so the question is, does it work well? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is no.
While the image on the 240px × 320px screen is crisp, with excellent contrast and brightness, but the phone is a let down for me because of two serious issues:
- The phone’s font is absolutely awful. It’s too square, it’s too bold, it’s just plain ugly.
- The browser has a number of bugs in it, and refuses to render some pages properly—particularly those that use tables for layout (which, while a semantic sin, is one of the only ways to create an attractive, colourful site in i-HTML).
Maybe it’s teething problems with the new platform, that would be understandable, but it doesn’t seem to have hindered NEC, who’s 411i does a great job of browsing the i-net, or whatever we’re supposed to call it.
On the plus side
The 2 mega-pixel camera (with flash) is actually a lot better than most comparable cameras I’ve seen on mobiles, and produces well defined, sharp images when set to the super-fine resolution.
The phone’s browser does support DoJa 2.5 lite and Flash Lite 1.0 (based on Flash 4), meaning that when people start making cool games for i-mode, you’ll be able to play them on this handset. If you’re a serious mobile-gamer though, you may want to wait for a handset to come out with Flash Lite 2 on (based on Flash 7). It’s worth noting that Flash operates natively withing the i-mode® browser, not as a plug-in or a download, so it should open up some exciting possibilities with vector graphics and simple games. I’ve not had the oppotunity to see any good examples yet and test them out on the phone, but needless to say when I do, they’ll be posted on here first.
The phone has a good quality mp3 player, with controls on the outside of the phone, allowing easy access to the media player, and the 80MB internal memory (plus support for TransFlash memory cards) means it could feasibly be used a basic portable mp3 player.
Of all the release phones, the Samsung S500i is without a doubt the most feature rich, it’s the closest that any of the i-mode® launch handsets gets to competing with ‘regular’ phones—in terms of what you can get for your money now—but it falls short in it’s key area, browsing i-mode®. Not short in that it actually hinders access to i-mode® sites (unless you consider poor legibility a hinderance, which come to think of it, I do), but it doesn’t give you as good an impression of i-mode® as you should get, particularly for sites that really push the design limits to the edge.
It’s safe to say that if you like the way it looks (the glossy black—and boy, is it glossy—is very i-pod Nano
/PSP
Key specifications
Samsung S500i Size 83 × 43 × 22 mm Weight 79g Java DoJa 2.5 lite Connectivity USB, Bluetooth, Memory Card Camera CMOS 1.3 Mega-pixels Display Screen size 240 × 320 pixels Wallpaper/browsing screen size 240 × 256 pixels DoJa 240 × 256 pixels Colours 260k Second screen 96 × 96 pixels, 65k colours i-mode Browser Access Inc. Netfront v3.2 Languages supported iHTML, xHTML, Flash Lite 1.0 Max page size 20kB i-mail Size limit 300KB Capacity inbox: 3.5MB, outbox: 2.5MB Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need more information on the technical aspects of the handset. The Samsung S500i is available exlusively from O2
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