Samsung has introduced yet another gorgeous phone to add to their U lineup. The Samsung SGH-U900 is a gorgeous slider phone with 5 mega pixel camera and some unique features. Read on to find out more about the Samsung Soul.
Samsung has introduced yet another gorgeous phone to add to their U lineup. The Samsung SGH-U900 is a gorgeous slider phone with 5 mega pixel camera and some unique features. Read on to find out more about the Samsung Soul.
Design
As the last member of Samsung's Ultra lineup of handsets, the SGH-U900 Soul has a fairly thin profile of only 13.5mm (.5"). The truth is that the rest of the phone is equally compact, considering all the technology it possesses. At 107mm x 49.5mm (4.2" x 1.9") in size when closed, the Soul fits comfortably in the hand as it does the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Of course you wouldn't want to put just any phone in your back pocket - not, at least, if you didn't want to break it. For its part, the Soul feels extremely solidly built thanks to a fair amount of metal in its construction. Solidness comes at the expense of some weight, though. 113g (4.0oz) is far from heavy, but there are many other devices on the market today that are far lighter. But that is OK because few of them can offer what the Soul can.
When closed, the front of the U900 is dominated by its dual displays. The main QVGA resolution TFT screen is incredibly sharp and colorful, looking for all the world like a 2.2" diagonal sheet of paper at times. It might be only passable in harsh, overhead sunlight, but it excels in just about any other situation. The OLED touchscreen that sits below the main display is one of the Soul's most interesting components. It offers amazing contrast and acceptable haptic vibration feedback that actually makes it a fine alternative to a hardware d-pad. In certain parts of the phone, such as camera application, it morphs to show icons for controls like macro mode and flash, which makes it even better than a d-pad.
Surrounding that touchpad controller are a set of fairly conventional softkeys and call control keys. While the buttons are all part of one solid piece of metal, they each offer great tactile feedback to users. The call keys and the softkeys all share the same white color scheme and backlighting. It would have messed with the Soul's style a bit, but perhaps red and green colors should have been used for the two call keys.
The keypad is revealed when the moderately sprung slider mechanism is opened up. The keypad is made of the same bronze-gray colored metal as the exterior of the phone, and the color coordination adds much to the Soul's overall good looks. The keyboard's keys have a fair number of raised finger guide ridges surrounding them, and they offer the perfect amount of click when pressed. The white backlighting on the keypad comes through superbly and has enough contrast to be easily read in both bright and dark environments. The top row of keys on the keypad include, from left to right, a video calling button, a clear key for editing, and a shortcut menu key.
Controls for the camera and volume are set on the side edges of the Soul, directly across from each other. While the position of the camera shutter button is fine, the volume keys would be better located closer to the top of the phone. This isn't really possible, though, since that is where the battery is located. Covered power/headset/USB (charger, headset, and cable included in the box) and microSD memory card ports sit below the volume and camera buttons, respectively. The main 5 megapixel, auto-focus camera, which is located behind the display on the top of the phone, can only be used when the slider is opened up. When closed, the camera lens, flash, and mirror are completely protected by the rear metal panel that covers the battery. There is a front facing camera located above the SGH-U900's main display that can be used for video calls, where available.
I spent a fair amount of time with prototypes of the Soul when the product was first announced earlier this year, but I am surprised by how much better the device seems now versus then. It is a beautiful looking device that is solidly built, has great ergonomics, and possesses some real nice high-tech bits in its clean looking design. 5 stars all the way.
Display
Samsung U900 Soul is equipped with a 2.2" 16M color TFT LCD display that supports QVGA resolution. It is one of the first Samsung handsets with a more than 262K-color screen. Not that it's that important, as the difference between 262K-color and 16M-color displays is barely visible on most cases. You either need a really trained eye or a special picture to notice anything.
The display itself has remarkable image quality and brightness, but is quite disappointing in terms of legibility under direct sunlight. As a matter of fact, this is the case with almost all recent Samsung handsets. We can't help wishing Samsung did something about that. It's a real pity that almost perfect indoors, the screen becomes useless outside.
Keypad
The keypad of Samsung U900 Soul was one of the most pleasant surprises to us. If you have been keeping track of our recent reviews you will know that dead flat keypads are not really our cup of tea. Therefore we didn't really expect wonders of this one. That's until we started using it.
The keypad uses really large keys and small metallic borders between rows to ensure great touch orientation. Also, mixing up two neighboring keys is pretty much out of the question with the U900 Soul. The space between keys cannot be pressed and this way borders exist without damaging the design of the keypad.
We are also generally very pleased with the touch pad and the controls surrounding it. The sensitivity of the touch pad can be set to one of the three available levels. When the sensitivity is to its minimum the touch pad needs as heavy press, almost like a normal key. This can be useful for people who cannot get used to the combination of touch sensitive and regular keys. As for us - we always used the phone with the touch sensitivity to the maximum as it provides best touch experience.
Another feature of the touch pad that we particularly enjoyed is the fact that you can configure the haptic feedback. You can once again go for one of the three levels of intensity and you can even switch it off if you prefer to do so. The backlighting is really nice. It is strong and even and makes using the phone in dark environments a piece of cake. All this said, we can safely conclude that the keypad of Samsung U900 is really great and texters will truly enjoy the phone.
User Interface
The UI makes use of subtle, but very effective animations on the main menu, which slides in from the right side of the screen. Nothing too fancy goes on, but the subtle size changes the icons go through when they are selected works well. The added icon labels are also a nice touch. For those that prefer more traditional menus, the main menu can be configured in a traditional list mode, which better matches the other menus in the phone.
The Soul's UI uses a number of different input types. The two most common are radio buttons and left/right select boxes. When there are only two options available, the option that is not currently active will be selected by default so that a quick tap on the OK button on the touchpad is all that is needed to activate it. When there are more than two options, the currently active option is highlighted. In the left right select boxes, moving left or right on the touchpad (which will then show left and right arrow heads) lets you change an option. Pressing the center button on the touchpad saves the currently configured settings page instead of bringing up a list of the available options that we would have rather seen. Though in its defense, the Soul's touchpad shows the center button as a 3.5" floppy disk icon, the universal symbol for save.
This is a fine example of the Soul's touchpad at its best. The way it morphs constantly to the task at hand is fantastic. No guessing is required. Even better is how it is used in the camera, where the settings shortcuts show right on the touchpad itself when they are available for use. It makes the entire photography process much simpler for novices and experts alike. It simply makes sense.
We are also quite impressed with the Soul's support of themes, especially user created themes. Many Samsung feature phones have rather weak theme support, but the Soul has a theme editor that is beyond pretty much anything else we have seen. While not all of the functionality of the pre-set themes can be duplicated, users can select from multiple menu icons sets, change font colors and styles, edit background images to use new colors, and more. It is very impressive.
The only real downside we see to the Soul's user interface has more to do with hardware than software. While we truly love the new touchpad, with its constantly morphing OLED display, we find that there is a bit of a mental disconnect when we move back and forth between the hardware softkeys, that move and click, and the touchpad, which doesn't move and causes non-localized haptic vibration on the phone. It isn't a major problem, but we do believe that it slows us down a bit at times. Overall, though, Samsung has done a fantastic job with the user interface on the U900 Soul.
Image editing
If you wish you can also edit your pictures using the integrated Image Editor - it's one of the most capable image editing applications for mobile phones. It allows you to apply a whole bunch of effects and adjustments. Transformations and crops, as well as insertion of various items, are also available. All in all, the Samsung U900 Soul offers you virtually all of the most popular editing capabilities you could possibly use on a cell phone. We still doubt it anyone takes image editing on their mobiles seriously.
Music player
Armed with generous internal memory of 128MB and a microSD card slot, the Samsung U900 Soul has every premise to act as a portable music player. It is therefore important that the music player application be up to the task. Not that it's that hard of a task but still sometimes it's the small things that mess up the big picture. Luckily this is not the case with the U900 Soul.
The Music player application allows filtering tracks by author, album, genre and composers. You can also choose to play either the tracks you've recently listened to, or the ones that you've played the most. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background. The player in Samsung U900 Soul has undergone some changes when compared to, say, Samsung U600 but the functionality isn't greatly altered. It has no equalizer presets, but sound effects instead. The difference is that the sound effects also include wide and surround options in addition to the seven available presets. There are also three types of visualization and you can enable fading out on stop if you like.
Video player
The video player is one of the phone features to reap the benefits of the touchpad. It gives you all the controls eliminating irksome labels over your video. Controlling the video player with the touchpad covers all essential features, including fast forwarding and rewinding, and these are easily accessed without going through menus. In addition, you can enjoy the videos fullscreen.
The camcorder works in MPEG-4 format, so there is no doubt the player supports it. That makes converting your favorite clips and movies to watch on your Samsung U900 Souls a piece of cake. Plus, the great picture quality of the display lets videos be enjoyed in their full shine.
Camera
Samsung U900 Soul is equipped with a 5 megapixel camera with a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. As it turned out, photography is really one of Soul's strengths. The camera interface very much resembles that of Samsung G800. It is a bit more user-friendly thanks to the four shortcuts on the touch pad but still not really our favorite. However, the available settings are quite a lot so we are willing to forgive the somewhat complicated menu.
Some of the more important settings are picture size, shooting mode (single shot, multi-shot, mosaic, and frame), effects (black and white, sepia, negative etc.), white balance and face detection. The face detection feature itself works pretty well and is even capable of recognizing several faces simultaneously. The additional camera settings include wide dynamic range, anti-shake, picture quality and ISO settings. Exposure metering is also configurable and the auto focus can be switched off if necessary.
The picture quality of Samsung U900 Soul is what impressed us here. We especially appreciated the image processing, which balanced in-camera sharpening, noise levels and scene detail with remarkable results you would hardly see in any other cameraphone. The only noticeable problem we see with the camera is the occasional red tint, which we are used to see in Sony Ericsson and LG cameraphones.
The activation of the wide dynamic range option doesn't help with the highlights, but brings in quite a lot of detail in the shadow areas at the cost of somewhat increased noise. Check out some samples showing what exactly this widely advertised feature does. Our guess is that you can do the same in Photoshop CS with the Shadow/Highlight function, but anyway it's a good feature to have in your phone. We are just not sure that the regular user will know when to switch it on. Having it switched on permanently is not an option since it doesn't bring any good to images in low contrast photo situations - besides it keeps turning off every time you switch the camera off.
Finally, impressed as we were with the U900 camera, we held it against the Nokia N95 8GB in an impromptu shootout. The latter has the best camera we've got to test so far, so there we were - curious if Soul would manage to outperform it. The results showed that Samsung U900 Soul's camera was really up to the task, producing better pictures than the N95 8GB on most occasions. Samsung U900 showed lower noise levels, more precise exposure metering and better in-camera processing. Nokia N95 8GB strikes back with more reliable color balance and better edge-to-edge sharpness (thanks to its bigger lens). Considering that it wasn't a full-scale shoot-out, we didn't cover all the possible parameters but only the most popular. Announcing a clear winner wouldn't be fair to either contender but we can only say that we did liked the Samsung U900 results better even though it is still in beta.
As far as video recoding is concerned, Samsung U900 Soul didn't really manage to impress us. The highest resolution available is QVGA and this is no longer considered a great achievement. The videos might turn out usable on some rare occasions anyway. We can't help our disappointment as VGA recording would have been the icing on the cake for the U900 Soul's camera.
Conclusion
The SGH-U900 Soul is a fantastic all-around multimedia cellphone. The camera takes photos that are far better than even Samsung's own photo-focused G800 can muster, and the music player and most of the other major functions work equally well. Except for the email client, that is. When you add to that a very slick and customizable user interface, and the new morphing touchpad controller, you have yourself a capable device. Package that into a slick little metal body, and well, you have yourself a winner.
And that, quite simply, is what the Soul is: a winner. We're not quite half way through 2008 yet, but it looks like we might have found a contender for the best non-smartphone of the year. The Soul is really that good. As such, we give it a "Highly Recommended" rating. You'll find additional screen shots and sample photos shot with the Samsung SGH-U900 Soul's camera on the following pages.
