First impressions of the Samsung E570

You may already be familiar with the garishly girly design of the Samsung E570 from its poster campaign, which portrays the phone covered in pink nail varnish with the heading “Imagine applying the finishing touch to your look”. And the E570 will certainly complete the look of a 14-year-old girl clad entirely in pink and sporting straightened blonde locks.

However, it will fail to satisfy the needs of the workaday young woman. Although the overall look of the phone would be pleasing to a 16-25 year-old, the flower detailing on the back is slightly OTT and the colour, which Samsung have claimed to be “hot pink”, is a most distinguished red.

Female-friendly applications loaded onto the E570 promise to equip health-conscious young women with a means to check up on their daily calorie intake and amount of exercise seem less like state of the art tools and more like a calendar of your daily battle with weight. These details could be recorded quicker using a pen on the back of a planner in your lunch break.

So what is it that gets you your money’s worth? Is it the 1.3 megapixel camera that gives you pictures that make you look like Frankenstein in a flower print dress? Or perhaps it’s the Polyphonic ringtones that sound like a fire alarm? No, what really makes you glad that you spent £115 on your daughter’s Christmas present (on pay-as-you-go because otherwise you’d be shelling out hundreds at the end of the every month) is the fact that you have to spend another 30 quid on the accessories so she can listen to The Pussycat Dolls on her phone – headphones are supplied but the USB cable for getting songs from the PC to the phone are sadly not included.

However, the Samsung E570 does have some impressive features. You can store to up to 500 songs and you can capture up to 90 seconds video, even if it is on a somewhat blurry 1.8 inch screen. The E570 also comes with a zoom function which can get that all important close-up for your MySpace profile picture, and boasts a battery life that lasts up to 250 hours on standby.

Its small and rounded shape makes it very easy to hold, and weighing in at just 81 grams, it feels like air in your pocket. The large easy-to-push buttons will make texting at record speed possible even for the acrylic nailed, and although the menu resembles that of the old E630, the brightness far surpasses that of its predecessor.

Although the Samsung E570 is slightly cliché it clearly serves its purpose in that it is already the most popular phone among teenage girls this year. But perhaps Samsung’s next attempt at a ladies phone will be less like a ball of pink fluff and more like a modern accessory.