Samsung SGH-F490V review

With its extended touch screen and flush frontage, the Samsung F490 is certainly long on style, but even a brief play with it reveals some pretty serious shortcomings.

Things start well enough with that elegant, slimline casing and looong 72x40mm touch screen, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone's acres of screen frontage.

Fire it up using the slider on the side and it has the same 'Croix' on-screen layout as the earlier F700 smart phone. This allows you to move the central point of a cross around the icon-based menu in any direction with your thumb. So far, très chic.

But touch screens, like Marmite, are love 'em or hate 'em things. They're great for saving space and maximising the screen's real estate, but if their accuracy or sensitivity slips they can become very fiddly to use.

And fiddly is what the F490 is all about. The screen requires quite a bit of pressure to get it to work, which helps prevent accidental usage but since the screen lock activates after about 15 seconds - even while you're on a call - this seems like an unnecessary precaution and quickly becomes a nuisance. Finishing a call, for instance, takes two presses: one to activate the touch-screen and another to press the call end button. Not a sign of joined up thinking on Samsung's part.

The lack of sensitivity means using the Croix interface is never an exact science, and negotiating menus by brushing up, down and across leads to a lot of mis-keys. The VibeTonez‚ haptic feedback, which presumably is meant to help guide your thumb to the correct position, began to feel like it was cruelly mocking us after a while, and we eventually switched it off.

Even a clever innovation like the fact that brushing the left side of the screen allows you to browse faster than brushing on the right comes to nought if you keep accidentally accessing functions you're trying to bypass. The volume buttons on the side can also be used for scrolling, and we found ourselves using these more and more as we became increasingly frustrated with the touch screen.

The problems persist when accessing the internet. Browsing the web on a screen like this should be a breeze, and look great. But web pages don't fit the widescreen dimensions and didn't render as well as we'd hoped.

Those volume buttons on the side allow you to zoom in and out of pages and you can flip between horizontal and landscape resolutions. Unfortunately, web pages don't look that great in landscape - you just don't see enough of the page.

You can of course use fingers and thumbs to access hot buttons on web pages, but we found they tended to be too small to access easily with our doofus digits.

Help appeared to be at hand when we discovered a stylus in the box, but like many elements of this phone, it doesn't appear to have been thought through clearly. It's not incorporated into the phone's body, but instead dangles off it attached to a little piece of string. Cool it ain't. More usefully, the phone comes with a soft case to protect that screen, possibly from the irate punches of users.

The 5 megapixel camera takes some perfectly decent shots in good light, though perhaps not as good as the megapixel count might suggest. The effectiveness of the LED flash is limited but there is a 3x optical zoom, which will get you nearer to your subject without degrading the pic quality like a digital zoom.

Video however seemed to be of pretty poor quality, even at the highest setting - and it doesn't even record in widescreen mode, which we might have expected the screen to be designed for.

In fact, making full use of the extra screen acreage isn't a straightforward process by any means. Downloaded video won't fit the dimensions without some additional conversion software so you might as well be watching on a standard screen. With some big black bands at either end.

The music player is okay, though it's easier to drag and drop music files from your computer rather than using the supplied PC Studio 3 software, which seemed to take forever. The onboard speaker has a decent amount of poke and can go louder than most, though of course, there isn't much bass. The headphones are unremarkable but thankfully there's a dedicated 3.5mm mini jack plug on top for adding your own.

You should be able to squeeze over 300 songs onto the supplied 1GB microSD memory card which incidentally you can hot-swap without removing the battery, though you will have to take the back off. Battery-wise it performed reasonably well - we got a good two days out of it with moderate use.

As a style phone, it looks great, very elegant and that large screen promises so much. In practise though, it's awkward to use, and the specs don't really measure up to a great phone, or even a very good one.