Samsung - SGH-i300 review
Windows Mobile Smartphone with a massive 3GB of storage
Review date: 13 February, 2006. Review by: Sandra Vogel
The mechanical drive very quietly clicks away to provide 3GB of storage. There's a bit more free storage on the handset and a slot for a MicroSD card on the right edge too, just in case that 3GB doesn't meet all your needs.
Microsoft updated its Windows Mobile Smartphone operating system last year, but the SGH-i300 runs the previous version. This isn't really a huge deal; you still get texting, MMS, e-mail, calendar, to-do list, voice notes, Pocket Internet Explorer and more, as well as Outlook 2002 for your PC and ActiveSync for synchronising.
Lest you think the SGH-i300 is behind the times, here are two reasons you'd be wrong. First, it runs the very latest version of Windows Media Player, version 10. Run the PC version 10 too and you can synchronise playlists onto the SGH-i300's hard drive. Second, it has the most advanced screen of any Windows Mobile Smartphone, offering 262,000 colours and running to 240 x 320 pixels.
Like most handsets these days there is a camera built in. This shoots stills and video, the former at resolutions up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels. There's a digital zoom which you can activate by spinning the navigation button round; you can also press it up, down, left and right as you would more normally do with a navigation button. The spinning can be used quite frequently at times when a scroll-wheel might be useful.
Unusually these days, the SGH-i300 comes with a docking cradle. This means you can see its screen when it is sitting on your desk connected to your PC instead of being forced to leave it lying flat on its back.
Also unusually, it comes with two batteries, one standard and offering up to four hours of talk time and 130 hours standby, the other longer life and rated at up to seven hours of talk and 200 hours of standby.
The longer life battery is larger and spoils the tidy line of the back casing when fitted, adding a little more bulk to a handset that, even without this, is a bit larger than the average. You can charge one battery in the cradle while using the other in the handset.
An obvious use for the SGH-i300 is as a music phone. Testing this we found audio output to be of reasonable quality, aided by the equaliser settings Samsung has provided with its own media player. Stereo speakers on the handset mean you can listen to music without a headset too, but don't expect perfect sound quality.
Verdict
The SGH-i300 isn't the prettiest handset in the world, and it wouldn't win any contests for being slim or light. But 3GB of storage is not to be sniffed at, either by music fans or those of us who travel with USB key drives full of this and that.
Company: Samsung
