Samsung S100 Review

Overall Rating

Data cable included, battery life, reception, triple band, ringtones.

No vibra and ringtones mixed. Poor ringtone loudness, green background on external screen.

So to be short, this Samsung S100 mobile phone is a good allrounder. It has its flaws but also has its strong points.

When opening the pack, i found two batteries, a headset and a data cable with software as the standard accessoiries. the data cable is really a plus. You can easilly manage your contacts, copy them to you sim or phone's memory, even to your computer. Also, you can manage ringtones, wallpapers and the organizer. The handset is recognized very fast and transfer is quite fast through the serial port.

One of the things that caught my attention is the external display of this handset. It is backlighted in blue color, but with the backlight off, the background color is green. Not something you'd expect. The green color causes the display to be harder to read when ther's no backlight. The inner display is a 65k Color STN display. It is hard to read in an angle and sunlight.

The ringtones are nice. Though a better volume was expected. As more of the Samsung phones, this one doesn't have the capability to vibrate and ring at the same time. The option wich is the closest to that, causes the phone to vibrate 3 times before starting the ringtone, but then the vibration stops. When carried in a pocket, the ringtones can be hard to hear in noisy places.

The phone supports java, thus letting the user download games and applets (MIDLETS). My favorite is the bowling game.

The performance of this phone is good. Even in spots when some of my other phones have a hard time, this one has good reception.the handset also functiones quite good. The menu is quite fast and direct. Writing messages can be confusing. I had an a800 before this one, and this phone has clearly a harder message write system.

The phone has a medium sized memory. That's a bit odd, since there's more space to put memory chips in that the A800 for example. The phone memory supports up to 50 numbers (with subnumbers) and 80 messages, along with the organizer entrys.

Last thing: the phone was targeted to the small business user and therefore is triple band, has GPRS and Infrared communication. But the majority of the users keep the phone in their pockets. That is when the external aireal comes to bug you. See to get it replaced by a mini aireal.



Summary: Average phone, for the small business man who wants to have all it's functions and accessiories. He has to have good ears and a bit patience to learn its functions.