Samsung SGH-D900 Review

After the glorious success of the RAZR-line of Motorola that changed the global meaning of the word “slim” and the perception of how a gadget should look, Samsung took that idea and developed it in their own way, designing the Ultra Series phones, which we've already loved thanks to the World's slimmest phone - the X820 Ultra. The SGH-D900 is the slider of the family and is half-inch thick black unit that stands out of the crowd with straight lines and elegant design, combined with multimedia functionality including one of the best cameras in a mobile phone nowadays. With its stylish look and small dimensions and weight, the D900 Ultra is targeted to both male and female users that want a high-end multimedia-oriented device, that doesn't suffer from bulky size or childish appearance.  In the extraordinary-designed box, typical for the Ultra phones of Samsung, the handset comes bundled with manuals, CD with software, charger, stereo headphones and USB cable for Computer synchronization.

Half-inch thick

What you will notice immediately is how thin the phone actually is and how well it fits in your hand, with solid built construction (producing no crackling noises) that other phones would be jealous of. You can use just one finger, putting in on the d-pad below the slightly raised surface, to open the phone's slider, as its movement is supported by flawless spring mechanism, which helps you to open both gently and fast. Exactly the same goes for closing it – you won't experience any problems, as the designers of Samsung Mobile have provided enough space for your fingers (you don't have to touch the display as it was with the bulky N80) and the constructors have done wonderful job with the mechanism.

Opening the phone reveals the numeric keypad that consists of twelve plastic keys with flat surface, rectangular form and big size. Moving your fingers through them, you won't feel the different keys and we'd preferred Samsung has used some relief channels between the rows and columns of buttons, as in the half-inch of thickness there is no space to raise the keys and they are almost totally flush. Pushing them gives good tactile response, and entering a text message will not wear your fingers out as it was in the case of the Sony Ericsson K800 phone, which shared the first place with the D900 in our camera comparison. The latter is much larger piece, as it is 70% thicker (0.9 inches for K800 compared to 0.5 inches for D900) and 25% heavier.

The good tactile response is a characteristic of the keys on the upper slider, too, and so is the relatively big size. We didn't experienced any problems with them, except with the D-pad that typically has small area and pressing it is a bit harder compared to the other keys of the phone; it is surrounded with silver metal strip that highly contrasts to the overall black look of the phone. Contrasting is also the backlight of the whole keypad, which is in bright white color that adds to the stylish look of the slider.

In silver metal color are also the volume keys on the left side and the camera-dedicated key on the right, which unfortunately lack any backlight but are relatively well situated on the thin bottom slider. Except the couple of side keys, there are also a couple of rubber covers for the microSD slot and the headset/charger/cable connector at the bottoms of respectively the left and right sides. They seem solid and removing them is not the most difficult we've seen, although their tiny size, which helps them not to destroy the design

Above the d-pad is a glossy-black mirror-like surface that houses the typical SAMSUNG logo and a 2.1” display right above it. The latter is a very bright TFT unit with QVGA 240x320 resolution (the same one is used in the rivals of the phone: K800, N73) delivering even the tiniest details in the displayed images, thanks to the small pixel size. The images displayed are with high contrast and very saturated colors. In direct sunlight, the display is visible, but if you want it to remain perfectly visible, it must be looked at a certain angle.

At the opposite side (the backside of the upper slider) is situated the phone's key feature – its megapixel camera. Next to its lens, in a silver surface are situated the mirror for self-portrait, the LED flash and the “3.0 auto focus” label between the last two. All these modules are in a little bulge at the back, but there is a hole at the top of the lower slider, so these fit perfectly in, when the phone is closed, unlike the X820 that is characterized with its humped back.

CC sized Card-D900-PEBL

CC sized Card-D900-PEBL

5Cents-D900-PEBL-MDA(top-bottom)

Interface:

The interface used in the slim D900 is similar to the one of the X820 Ultra, but in this case it is in portrait orientation instead of landscape one because of the difference in the two displays' resolutions. Except the standard service information like Signal straight, battery power and soft keys information, the home screen shows large date and time at the top. It is a must to put some high-res image as a background of the beautiful QVGA display, and as there is enough place you can also select a static calendar to show on the top of it.

An interesting feature is a Theme built in the phone that puts animated background with landscape scene (a forest and sky with birds flying around) during the day and automatically turns to a night scene (falling stars instead of the birds) during the night-hours. Unfortunately, D900 doesn't support other “real” themes that change the layout of the menu and its icons, but only a couple of color skins (black and silver one) (see main menu)

By default, Left, Down, and Right on the directional pad are shortcuts for “New Message”, “Music Player” and “Calendar', while pressing it Up opens a mini “My Menu” that is user-defined in the way the function of the four directions of the key are. Sadly, the central key is again Ok/internet key as in older Samsung phones and pressing it won't open the main menu but an internet browser instead, and we found ourselves hitting it very often, losing lots of time and nerves.

The main menu itself consists of Grid of nine icons, while most modern phone with grid-style menu show twelve icons at a screen. The background is in black or silver (depending on the color skin you've chosen) but is not transparent and do not show any background image (you can see some background image when you are viewing a sub-menu though). Moving through the menu options, you see that every icon has its dedicated color that is pleasant, combined with the simple design of the icons, producing overall simple, stylish, and functional menu. It can also be displayed as a list but in this case the colors we've just mentioned are missing and it looks boring as a whole, although the sub-menus pop up when you highlight any of the main menu options (0-9). Keyboard shortcuts are available in both grid and list view and they work flawlessly in the sub-menus as well. Moving from one submenu to other is also possible with left-to-right and vice versa but there is no indication for all the menus as tabs, as it was in the European Chocolate for example, and so is not that comfortable.

Black skin

Black skin

List view

Silver skin

Phonebook:

The phonebook capacity is a thousand contacts and all that are saved are displayed in list without images but with the number and index icon (displaying its type – home, mobile, work, etc) next to it. Adding a contact is done in a few steps and there are two fields for names (first and last), five for numbers (which type can be changed and so you can enter five mobile numbers for example), email and notes text fields, one data field for birthday and three fields for group and personal CallerImage and CallerRinger. Searching of contact is performed by directly typing letters but unfortunately works only for the first word in the First name.

You can change the way the dialing screen looks, with the options to customize the font size (Small, Medium and Large) and its color, with “Rainbow” setting that gives different color to every character you type, which makes recognizing one from other easier. The built-in theme we've already discussed in the Interface part offers fun animated pen that writes on a white sheet of paper, but its performance is slower than the ordinary option.

Theme

Standard

Organizer:

The whole phone organizer is in the seventh sub-menu of the phone, called “Planner”. All the standard functionality is here:
1. Alarm: three alarms that can be programmed for different days and times and ringing with user-defined melodies. Unfortunately you don't have option to rename them. The phone can also be set to turn Auto power-up if it is shut off.

2. Calendar with view by Week and Day options, and easy to add events in four groups (Appointment, Anniversary, Miscellany, Task) with alarm option.



3. Memo is for simple notes.


4. World clock with “world-map interface” but without option to save a set of cities, which time to follow for faster access.


5. Calculator with simple interface and options


6. Converter with six options but with ugly interface that also doesn't remember what settings you've used last (if you convert inches to millimeters, next time you want to do the same you will have to change the position “mm” to “inch” again)



7. Countdown timer


8. Stopwatch, saving up to four times, which is pretty basic and useless.

A voice recorder is situated in another sub menu of the phone; it allows for recording a sound clip with the phone's microphone and its interface is similar to that of the music player, as it was in the X820.

The D900 has 60MB of built-in memory that can be expanded through microSD cards, thanks to the slot on the left side. Protected by a rubber cover it allows for hot-swapping of memory cards without removing the battery and turning the phone off.

Messaging:

Nothing extraordinary with the messaging part too: everything is in the “Messages” that takes the central position at the main menu. For faster entering you can use Templates that you should have saved on your own; T9 also helps for the text input part. Composing a text or multimedia message is a piece of cake and in the last, you can add images or sounds from your phone's memory; the same can be done when sending an email message, as the phone is supporting SMTP/IMAP/POP3 protocols.
Retrieving of emails can be done as full emails or by headers only, which can help you for faster speed and smaller amount of data transferred to the phone.

Connectivity:

Samsung SGH-D900 is quad-band GSM phone which makes it capable of world-roaming and so it can work in GSM networks on every continent. For data it packs GPRS and the faster EDGE with the last convenient for working with email or browsing the internet. For local connectivity the phone supports Bluetooth v2.0 which allows it to transfer data with high-speed through it. The support of various Bluetooth profiles gives it additional functionality and we are happy to see the A2DP profile for stereo audio here. Using the Bluetooth we didn't encourage any problems transferring multimedia files to and from the phone.

For synchronizing with a computer, the phone comes with USB cable in the box and CD containing Samsung PC Studio software. In our opinion, their software handles perfectly with what it should – you can easily manage the phonebook, organizer and messages, as well as the files on the phone (images, music, and video) and in addition, “Synchronise” option allows you to synchronize the phone and the computer with just one click. We found the tools for editing of pictures, music, and video files handy, as you will not need any other software to get multimedia files ready for your phone (you can easily crop and adjust images or cut parts of music files to be suitable for ringing tones).
During our test, using the USB cable provided with the phone, we transferred 17.1MB of data for 2 minutes and 45 seconds, which is speed of ~106KBps and is definitely not the fastest we've seen. The N73 for example transferred 1.45 MB per second, which is about 14 times faster!

Samsung's player

The internet browser is mediocre one, which is sad, as the phone has great QVGA resolution of the display that is enough for proper visualization of normal web pages over a phone. We did not encounter any problems with loading Google and searching through it, but once we've tried to open PhoneArena's main page the phone showed that it's not a smart one – an Error saying “Document too large” appeared instead of the site itself.

Camera:

3-megapixel camera with mirror and LED flash

After holding down the camera key with the slider opened, the interface loads for 3 to 4 seconds showing several indicators of the chosen setting, for a few seconds. If you have selected the Viewfinder at “Fullscreen view and indicators” you'll see them for the whole time. Another useful option is the one that automatically saves an image after the photo is taken, as you won't have to manually select ‘options – save' after every single shot – this way you can save your time for shooting.

The strangest thing about the camera interface is that it is in portrait mode and not in landscape, as other camera phones we have tested, but it also takes landscape-oriented photos, which means that you are actually not seeing the whole final image in the viewfinder but just the center part of it. In the final image there may be some objects that you haven't had an idea about and didn't wanted to occur in your composition, but when seeing this it will already be late. Another relatively strange thing is that the “shutter key” cannot be pressed at “half” position but holding it down focuses and than automatically takes a picture – this is not a big problem, but something just extraordinary as all other phones that feature auto-focus use two-step keys for focusing and than capturing the image.

As options before taking pictures you can use a set of color effects (Black and White, Negative, Sepia, etc), up to thirty fun frames (the images saved using them are in small resolution) and Self-timer (3, 5 or 10 seconds). The flash can be set in four modes: forced off, Auto, Shoot only, and Permanent, and the other is also useful as a flashlight but drains the battery's power fast.

Menu	Shooting	Effects
Frames	Flash	Self-Timer

The highest resolution available is 2048x1536 (3.2 megapixels) but there is total of nine picture resolution options, as well as three options for the compression (Normal, Fine, Superfine). A very useful "feature" is that all the numeric keys are shortcuts, and you can see what they do in a mini-map.

The images taken outdoor during the day were the best compared to four other 3-megapixel cameraphones currently on the market, providing the greatest detail and most realistic color representation among all. Shooting macro (close-up photos of small objects) doesn't need an additional scene mode, but brings great results as well with detailed images and realistic colors. Most other phones (and digital cameras) need special “macro” mode to be switched on to focus on objects nearby. 

Samsung D900	Canon SD200

The LED flash is not as powerful as that of the N73 and definitely cannot be compared to the Xenon flash of the K800, and so the images in low-lightning conditions suffered from much noise and not real colors. Shooting night-photos, using the night mode, gives excellent (for phone) results though, and if you hold the D900 steady to avoid camera shake and blurry photos, the images produced will be detailed and realistic, and among the best ones captured with camera-phone.

As a camcorder the phone can record videos at maximum resolution of CIF 352x288 with additional three sizes and the same three options for compression as with the pictures. Using the “Normal” Recording mode you can record video, limited in time by only the available memory.
The CIF resolution is big enough for watching the videos on computer but although their relatively big size (~600kbps) there are plenty of artifacts due to the compression and the low frame rate kills the motion in fast-moving objects. 

Audio:

The MP3 player is again similar to the one used in the X820, featuring four Equalizer options (Normal, Jazz, Classic, Rock) and two types of visualizations, which actually are not based on the music played. The music can be comfortably organized in playlists, but unfortunately their number is limited to four and so is their capacity, limited at thirty, which collectively means that the phone can put only 120 songs in the playlists.

The speakerphone produces distorted and not very loud sound and is not suitable for music playback, but the headphones from the box are fine and sound better than those of Sony Ericsson K800. We would still like to have a 3.5mm adapter for using standard headphones, which can sound much better at a low cost.

The video player opens 3GP videos in full size but the browser cannot play them in landscape view. With these wonderful QVGA displays we would like to be able to watch videos in MPEG4 format with H.264 codec for the best quality available, but unfortunately the D900 doesn't support them, as it was with the K800, and you are limited to low quality videos only.

Software:

The D900 comes with seven preloaded JAVA games including some popular names like “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Asphalt2 – T&B” ,but unfortunately both of them are trial locked versions and you have to purchase the full ones to fully enjoy the gaming experience. The other games include Tetris, Cannonball, Soccer game, but what we didn't like about the JAVA is the time it takes to load up. In all the games, we experienced a lot of waiting, and for example, the Sonic game took fifteen second to load, which is pretty much in our opinion. The phone support JAVA MIDP2.0 and other applications can be easily downloaded.

Performance:

When compared to other phones from the multimedia class, the reception of the D900 is definitely not perfect, it's just around or below the average and very similar to the one of the Nokia N73 and N80 models but below that of the K800 from Sony Ericsson. During a call the voice we heard sounded a little distorted, while the other party heard us clear and realistic, but unfortunately the sound volume at the both sides was just about average. According to the manufacturer, the 800mAh battery can drive the phone for more than three hours of talk time and ten days in standby mode, but depending on your usage, it will not last more than four days.

Conclusion:

What is easily noticeable about the D900 is its design! It is a multimedia phone, but compared to its rivals, the N73, the K800, the N80, etc it is much slimmer and better looking, with stylish design and solid construction quality. The slider is form-factor that is definitely up to date at the moment, has flawless spring mechanism and cleverly hides the bulge of the 3-megapixel camera, which quality in outdoor photos make it one of, or maybe the best one among the cellphones nowadays, when compared to the other high-end cameraphones on the European and American market. As the phone's main drawbacks, we can state the limited capabilities of the music and video players and the average phone performance.