Playing Around with the Samsung i620 Slider Smartphone

The first thing you will notice when you pick up the Samsung i620 is just how small it is and how well it fits in your hands. Samsung is really on to something with this ultra small sliding form factor. It’s the right size for any pocket or purse, and it’s a lot of fun to hold and slide open/shut. I often found myself sliding the phone just for the sake of sliding it. The sliding mechanism is so smooth and the spring action really helps to pop the phone open. I’ve used other sliding phones, but never have they had such a nice slider/spring combination.

Once you held the phone and played with the slider for a good couple minutes, you’re going to start to wonder about the specs of this little guy. It’s a European-based Tri-band device, which means it supports GSM 900/1800/1900 frequencies. Which works great if you’re in the EMEA, but if you’re North American based, this device will have mixed results when it comes to cellular reception. If Samsung had managed to include one more band, then this phone would be a sure fire hit in North America. I’ve heard rumours that there is a North American Tri-band device that is going to be released in the fall of 2008, but at this point I haven’t been able to confirm anything. Aside from the cellular bands supported, the phone also features GPRS/EDGE/3G HSDPA at 1.8 Mbps, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, MicroSD support, Bluetooth v2 with A2DP, 2 Megapixel camera, VGA video-call camera, and measures 113mm x 59mm x 11.8mm with a weight of 95 grams.

Compared to the popular HTC Excalibur (also known as the T-Mobile Dash), the i620 is about the same width, but shorter and a little thicker. Unfortunately, like other Samsung devices, it doesn’t use a standard USB connector for sync/charge. In fact, the connector appeared to be different than the original BlackJack and the BlackJack II. I really wish Samsung would come to a decision on what style connector to use and stick with it!.

The i620 has a jog style wheel in much the same fashion as the i617 (BlackJack II). The major difference between these two is that on the i620, it actually works well enough to use! Unlike the BlackJack II where you have to complete one full rotation in order to move a single space in the application, the i620 scrolls very nicely through your applications. In fact, one rotation of the wheel will scroll 4 or 5 times which makes for a much better experience.

The buttons on the front of the i620 are feather light touch. You don’t need to push on the buttons, just lightly rest your finger on it and they will respond. Of course, this is cool, but it’s also a pain. A number of times I found myself accidently brushing a button and the phone would jump to make a call or activate a menu. The feather light buttons are a refreshing change from the typical buttons found on every other smartphone out on the market today. I wish they had a little more resistance before activating.

An interesting side note about the hang-up button on the front of the phone; Samsung has designed the phone to hang up when you slide it shut. This action can be changed in the control panel, but it doesn’t allow enough flexibility in my opinion. If you’re in a call, you can’t press the hang up button to disconnect. It won’t do anything when pressed. You actually need to slide the phone shut in order to hang up. But what if I need to make another call? Doesn’t it seem silly that I have to slide it shut only to reopen the keyboard again? My only guess as to why it behaves like this is that Samsung didn’t want you to accidently hang up a call by brushing those feature light buttons against the side of your face. I can understand that, but it would have been nice to have another option to hang up the phone.

The keyboard on the i620 is the exact same feel as the BlackJack II. It’s a firm keyboard with a little space between each of the keys allowing your fingers to easily find their place on the keyboard without having to look at the keyboard all the time. The i620 also has the numeric keypad layout that was seen on the original BlackJack smartphone. Pressing either the E or R keys on the keypad will result in a number 1, T and Y will produce a number 2, U and I will show a 3, etc… This design makes it very handy to locate and press a numeric value on the phone without even looking. It also centers the numeric buttons across the phone instead of putting them all on one side of the keyboard. I wish Samsung continued this process on the BlackJack II. It’s so much easier to use this way.

The i620 has a standard 320×240 resolution, but the physical size of the screen is less than the average landscape smartphone. This results in a crisper overall image. While I would like to see a larger screen on some of the Samsung devices, it’s hard to trade for a bigger screen and lose the sharper images that this screen provides. Regardless, there isn’t much in the way of free space on the i620 to jam a larger screen into the device.

Samsung has always done a nice job inside the phone, and the i620 is no exception. I’ll start with the home screen modifications/additions as these are the first thing you will notice when you turn on the device. There are a couple different home screens included on this device, the default home screen is called the “Samsung Tab” which displays a clean home screen with little clutter. There’s access to all the more common applications along the bottom of the screen. As you move between the tabs, the items displayed above are updated to reflect your selection. So on Mail, you will see a message count for SMS and email accounts. On Calendar you will see the next upcoming appointment, and so on.

The other pretty cool home screen is the “Samsung Living World” screen. This provides a animated background that changes to reflect the time of day. During the day it will be sunny and you will see airplanes flying by. At night, you will see it get darker and shooting stars will pass by in the night. It’s a pretty nice home screen but I worry about the battery power that it would consume. Hopefully it stops animation when the screen is off.

Another really nice change, is the animation used for when the phone is charging. I know, that sounds silly and petty, but it’s actually pretty slick and it’s the small things that really make the experience worthwhile. For those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, if the phone is off and you plug it in to charge, some devices will display an animation on the screen showing you the status of the charge. For the i620, it starts off showing a low amount of liquid or fuel on the device screen. As the phone charges, this fuel flows into the phone and fills the screen. The color of the fuel helps to represent the amount that is left in the phone. When the battery is low, the color is blue and when it’s full, the color changes to green.

The operating system on this device is Windows Mobile 6.0. Samsung has added their typical list of extra programs. If you’ve used a BlackJack or BlackJack II, then the extra applications on this device should be very familiar to you – Documents viewer, Smart Converter, Smart Search, Stop Watch, Java, RSS Reader, Alarms, etc… There’s also a couple of special extra’s on this unit – like Opera’s browser version 8.65. We’re starting to see more and more manufacturers adding Opera into the ROM. I like the idea, I’m just not sold on it being burned into the ROM as it makes it harder when it comes time to upgrade.

This picture was taken with the i620 on an overcast day. I don’t think you would want to be using this camera for those “special” memories, but it’s good enough for every day use. Click on the above image to see the full sized image. I snapped a couple other shots of the kids and the colors always seemed pretty good. It was a little slow in the shutter lag, but that tends to be the case with multi-purpose devices.

Overall, this phone was a pleasure to use on a daily basis. It’s the perfect size to fit nicely in a pocket or purse. The slide out keyboard has a great feel to it, especially for anyone that’s used the BlackJack series of devices. The biggest problem I had with the phone is the European tri-band configuration. While it works in North America, it just doesn’t get the level of reception that we have become accustom to. I would really like to see more quad band devices, or even just North American tri-band version of Samsungs devices.

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