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By Jonathan Cheah

Samsung’s second slider in Malaysia is a lot smaller in size than the first one. Shall we take a look and see if the product lives up to the hype?

At A Glance:

Price: RM 1,599 Local Distributor: Samsung (M) Sdn Bhd. Build quality: 8/10 Applications: 7/10 Interface: 8/10 Value-for-money: 7/10 Overall rating: 7.5/10 + Sequential image capture + Small - Easily scratches - 24MB memory, no expansion - No video function - No Bluetooth

It has been a while since we last saw a good slider phone with a colour screen. Two years, to be exact. It has been that long since Nokia introduced the 7650 Symbian phone, and I am very curious as to why they discontinued that line. The other slider phones in between the 7650 and this E800 are forgettable.

Egg phone?
This is probably the first time I have heard anyone describe their phone as an egg. To me, an egg is a paradox, where something valuable is contained within a fragile shell. In this case, the phone comes in a pearl white shell, but the back of the phone scratches easily. I guess that this is the kind of phone you should not leave lying around on a table.

Sliding the phone shut automatically locks all the buttons on the phone except for the menu-lock sequence. This is great because the buttons on both sides of the phone tend to get in the way a lot. When fielding or making calls, my fingers kept hitting the buttons on the side of the phone, and frequently ended up decreasing the volume setting.

Nevertheless, I must say that I am very impressed with the quality of the sliding mechanism on the phone. I had expected it be flimsy, since most slider phones are rather flimsy in construction, but this one really seems solid. I did not perform a drop test here, but I think that the E800 would survive a few minor drops without compromising its shell.

Using the E800
The small phone is quite pleasant to use, although at times my hands felt a little too wide for this phone and kept pressing the wrong buttons. The conversations held on this phone were clear enough for my needs.

However, as you have probably imagined, SMS texting was a little difficult on this phone. First of all, the buttons are really small. More importantly, there is a sort of ridge running around the bottom of the keypad. Although this ridge surrounds the entire keypad, it is more pronounced at the bottom, and accentuates the difficulty of one-handed SMS typing.

There are two games in our review unit, namely SnowBallFight and BubbleSmile. Both are Java games, and loaded fairly quickly. The absence of a shooter game suggests that this phone was meant for those of a feminine persuasion, and this is stressed by the small size of the phone. The average male would find it difficult to use because of the size of his hands.

Editor,s Opinion

The Samsung E800C is a good phone. The traditional Samsung menu has been changed into a grid of nine icons much like that of a Sony-Ericsson. It can send and receive MMS, but on the amount of memory available, I doubt that you will be doing that very much. In actual use, the battery is good for around two days, with about an hour of calls and a few SMS messages. The support for Java games is a nice touch, but it seems that this is for MIDP 1.0 only, whereas the features of the newer version are not included. For some inexplicable reason, Samsung Malaysia likes to withhold the product manual from the reviewers. This is a pleasant-looking phone, and is sure to appeal to the ladies. However, I would say that RM 1,800 is a tad high for the phone, as competing phones in this price bracket would come with a megapixel camera and Bluetooth connectivity. However, the aesthetic value of the phone may be the factor behind Samsung asking a higher price for it. I’ll wait for Samsung’s Bluetooth Slider phone – the D500 – which should be here pretty soon.