Mobile News and Phone Reviews

The World’s slimmest phone offers a lot for your money, provided that you can put up with its touch-sensitive buttons and a battery life that’s shorter than average.

The Samsung E840 is the World’s slimmest slide phone, beating the Samsung U600 by a hair’s breadth at 10.6mm. Usually it’s the top-of-the-range phones that set these kinds of records, but the E840 is a mid-range phone. It’s very impressive how Samsung have managed to cram so much into such a tiny phone at this budget. If you wanted a U600 but couldn’t afford it, then this could be the one for you.

Although it’s recognisably a Samsung, the E840 deviates a bit from the usual Samsung slider look and feel. Apart from its incredible thinness, it feels solid enough, weighing in at 99g (heavier than most recent Samsungs) and has a nice smooth glassy finish. The keypad isn’t the best, but it’ll be fine unless you have particularly large fingers. However, it does come with love-them-or-hate-them touch-sensitive navigation buttons. Our frank advice on this is to avoid the phone unless you’ve already had experience of touch-sensitive buttons (e.g. in the Samsung E900 or LG Chocolate). A safe alternative which now costs about the same is the Samsung D900i.

Sill reading? OK, well apart from the touch-sensitive issue, we like the phone a lot. It’s got a lot of stuff packed into its miniature bodywork. First thing that you’ll notice is the huge (2.2 inch) ultra high resolution LCD display on the front. The camera is less impressive, being rated at 2 megapixels and lacking a flash - it’s for snaps only, and won’t replace a proper digital camera. But the music player is fully featured, playing a wide range of formats and handling playlists quite nicely too. A built-in FM radio completes the scene. There’s also a good amount of memory available - 70 Mbytes - which is enough for around 15 songs - and you can buy a memory card really cheaply these days to expand the storage. Connectivity is good, with support for Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and a TV-Out connection if you want to display pictures or videos directly onto your telly. It’s quadband too, so you can take it anywhere abroad and it has a useful document viewer for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

Although Samsung claim impressive an battery life, we are sceptical. You just can’t fit a big battery in a phone this skinny, and the reality is that the E840 is challenged when it comes to battery life.

So, a lovely phone with plenty of features in a good looking superslim body, the E840 offers a lot for your money. Provided that you can put up with the touch-sensitive buttons and don’t demand too much from the battery, this is a phone that you could really love.

Features of the Samsung E840 include:

• 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom
• Video camera
• Display: mirror-effect TFT, 262,144 colours, 240 x 320 pixels
• Music player (MP3/ ACC/ ACC+/ e-AAC+/ WMA formats)
• FM radio
• 64-voice polyphonic ringtones / MP3 ringtones
• Voice memo recorder
• Speakerphone
• Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS, Email (POP3 / SMTP / IMAP4)
• Document viewer
• Java games & applications
• Offline Mode (Flight mode)
• Personal information functions
• Caller ID (Text / Photo / Video)
• WAP 2.0, GPRS Class 10, EDGE
• Memory: 70 Mbytes plus MicroSD™ memory card slot
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, TV-Out
• Quadband
• Size: 102 x 53 x 10.6 mm
• Weight: 99g
• Talktime: 4.5 hours
• Battery standby: up to 360 hours

The E390 takes the extremely popular slider design that Samsung have virtually perfected now, and provides all of the most popular features that users expect from a phone in 2007 - a decent camera, an MP3 player, Bluetooth wireless connectivity and an expandable memory. It’s very lightweight and compact (although not ultraslim) and is priced very competitively. If you like Samsung’s slide design and are in the market for a mid-range phone, then this is the one.The E390 is the follow-up to the very successful E370. This mid-priced range of slider phones from Samsung just keeps on getting better. Each Summer, Samsung introduces a new one with the same basic design but enhanced features. The E350 was the first in 2005, followed by the E370 in 2006, and now in summer 2007 comes the E390. The E350 was rated 5 stars by our users and the E370 was rated 4 stars, although we rated it 5 stars ourselves. So you can see that everything bodes well for the E390, and it doesn’t disappoint.

The E390 is a classic slide design phone. Samsung have really cornered the market in sliders and have had plenty of time to perfect the design. The E390 glides smoothly up and down, and is a perfect example of why the slide design is so successful: 1) it’s great fun; 2) it makes for a very compact phone with a large screen; and 3) it’s just so easy to use, since you can unlock the keypad or answer a call just by flicking the phone open. The E390 is perhaps perfectly sized too - it’s not ultrathin, but is a good size to hold in your palm, and is not as wide as the ultra-slim range, so it’s much easier to hold. It’s extremely lightweight too (just 84g) and has a lovely ergonomic keypad.

The display is an improvement over the E370. It’s a bright TFT screen that’s easy to read. It doesn’t offer the 262k colours or high-resolution of the more expensive Samsungs, but for the price it’s acceptable. The camera is also definitely not a high-end device, offering 1.3 megapixels with a digital zoom but no autofocus. It takes pictures that are good enough for viewing on the phone or maybe for printing if you’ve got good lighting conditions and a steady hand, but it won’t replace a dedicated digital camera. It can also take reasonable quality video clips.

The E390 has a music player that is quite well featured, with support for playlists. Once again, we have to point out that this is not up to iPod standards, and audio quality through the speakers is a bit tinny, but with a pair of stereo headphones audio quality is good enough. A wireless Bluetooth stereo headset is available as an optional accessory. One of the key improvements over the E370 is that the E390 supports MicroSD™ memory cards, so you can expand the phone’s memory to enable storage of 100’s of songs if you like. Memory cards are pretty cheap - a 1 Gybte card costs under a tenner.

The E390 offers most other features that a typical user might want, e.g. mp3 ringtones, Java games, a speakerphone, fast EDGE internet access, multimedia messaging, email, flight mode and quadband. Battery life is good too. There’s really nothing not to like about the E390.

We recommend the Samsung E390 if you like the slide design and are looking to spend under £150 on a phone. Before buying you should also consider the Sony Ericsson K550i, which is a conventionally-shaped phone but offers more for your money.

Features of the Samsung E390 include:

• 1.3 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom
• Video camera
• Display: TFT LCD, 65,536 colours, 176 x 220 pixels
• Music player (MP3, ACC, ACC+ formats)
• 64-voice polyphonic ringtones / MP3 ringtones
• Speakerphone
• Voice memo recorder
• Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS, Email (POP3 / SMTP / IMAP4)
• Java games
• Personal organiser functions
• Phonebook (,000 Phone book entries)
• Caller ID (Text/Photo)
• WAP 2.0, GPRS Class 10, EDGE
• Memory: 12 Mbytes plus MicroSD™ memory card slot
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 1.1
• Flight mode
• Quadband
• Size: 94 x 47 x 16.8 mm
• Weight: 84g
• Talk time: 6 hours
• Battery standby: 395 hours