Samsung Soul Review

The Samsung Soul is the first mobile phone review I’ve done in a while, but I felt it deserved more coverage as it’s an intriguing mobile phone. Not only does it look stunning (which is a nice new trend that Samsung have managed to keep up throughout their entire Ultra range of mobile phones, of which the Soul is set to be the last), but it comes with some cracking features as well.

The Samsung Soul is the flagship phone for Samsung for 2008, so you’d expect it to be feature-rich, but feature-rich and good looking? That takes some doing!

The question is, how well do the features on the Samsung Soul work? Read on to find out with our comprehensive Samsung Soul review.

Samsung Soul Review

First up, the basics. The Samsung Soul (or Samsung SGH-U900 Soul to give it its official, if slightly less catchy name!) is a brand new slider phone that must be the first phone released this year that doesn’t come with a touchscreen! Instead, you get a touchpad beneath the screen, which features a series of OLED icons that change according to the feature that you’re using. When in music mode, for example, you’ll see fast forward, rewind, play and stop icons, whilst in camera mode, you’ll get icons to shoot pictures, adjust focus, etc.

The Touchpad (or the “Magic Touch” screen, as Samsung are somewhat optimistically calling it) is one of the key features of the Soul that Samsung are keen to promote, and with good reason. As the video at Pocket-Lint shows, it’s a novel form of user interface that interacts well with the menus on the screen, and the fact that the keys animate when you touch them is also a neat touch (although not a magic one!). It certainly seem to make the whole business of selecting the right menu option at the right time far more intuitive than the standard approach of pushing fixed, static and rather lifeless buttons until you get the phone to do the action you want it to.

The Samsung Soul’s camera

Speaking of cameras, the Samsung Soul’s is a beast. Five megapixels is the headline figure, but it also comes with autofocus, face-detection (ensuring the face in a picture is firmly in focus) and anti-shake technology, ensuring your pictures look crisp and clear regardless of how drunk you are when you actually take them! You can even adjust the ISO settings, which really makes this phone stand out as a proper camera phone.

MP3 player with Bang and Olufsen amp

In addition to a great camera, the Soul also comes equipped with a cracking MP3 player, powered by a Bang and Olufsen amp. Samsung have used B&O a few times in their phones now, and with good reason, as not only does the branding not exactly hurt, it ensures the quality and clarity of the Soul’s music-playing abilities are first rate.

Connectivity

Connectivity is another area where the Soul scores highly, although it must be said, not in all areas. The Soul is not just a 3G device, and for that matter, it’s not even just an HSDPA device; no, the Soul offers 7.2Mbps data transfer using the fastest variant of HSDPA currently on the market (though this is only useful if your network also supports it, which unfortunately for you guys in the US, is approximately nobody at all at the moment!).

However, and this might be a deal breaker for some, although offering blisteringly fast data transfer speeds, the Soul is only tri-band. This isn’t a problem if you only want to go the US and Europe, but if you want to travel any further, you’ll need a quad-badn phone, and the Soul just won’t work. In 2008, for a flagship phone, this is a crazy decision, particularly for a company as global in nature as Samsung.

Other bits and bobs

As well all the usual stuff you’d expect from a phone (Bluetooth 2.0, email, etc.), the Soul also comes with a 16 million colour 2.2″ screen, 100MB of internal memory, microSD card support, and is only 12.9mm thick (same thickness as the old Samsung D900).

Other Samsung Soul reviews

The Samsung Soul has only just been released, having only been announced in February, and so reviews from across the Web are a bit thin on the ground at the moment. However, there enough to provide you with even more info on this great looking phone, to give you a feel for whether you actually want to buy one or not.

Mobile Phone UK, for example, have reviewed the Samsung Soul, and like it a lot, awarding it five stars. They sum it up as “…a super-sexy super-slim slide phone that looks very 2008 with its dual-screen touch-sensitive controls and metal casing. With a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, 3G video calling, MP3 player, FM radio and plenty of memory it should tick most people’s boxes,” and conclude that “…it really is a fabulous phone, and we love it to bits.”

Can’t say better than that! Oh wait, we can…!

Yes, PhoneArena also got their hands on a Samsung Soul, but so far they’ve only previewed it, and so don’t tell you whether they actually like it or not. Still, there’s tonnes of info on the Soul there, and loads of pics, too, so worth checking out.

Finally, we have the review from the cunningly named Cell-Phone Reviews, who also like it loads. They conclude with “Well, what can I say? Though my time with the Samsung SGH-U900 was limited, I was really impressed, especially with the camera. Let’s recap: As a fashion phone, the Samsung SGH-U900 passes; as a camera phone, it passes with flying colors; and as a music phone, this one is passable.”

So, go for the Soul if you want a great camera phone or designer phone (or both!), but stick to a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone if you want a music phone.

Summary

So there you have it – the Samsung U900 Soul in all its glory. It’s a great looking phone, its features are top-notch, it’s on sale now, and it’s surprisingly cheap, given that it’s a flagship model. It should sell by the bucket-load, and Samsung are being really aggressive with its pricing, so if you want a great priced super-cool flagship phone, go buy a Samsung Soul now!