The Samsung i300 is revolutionary for two reasons: it's Samsung's first smartphone, and is also the first phone to use a hard disk drive. The i300 uses Windows Mobile as its operating system instead of Symbian, so the user interface will be familiar to users of Microsoft Windows. Early releases of the phone seem to have been a bit buggy but that has now been fixed. The phone isn't the easiest to use, but given the number of features, you must expect to have to put in some effort learning how to use the device. Once learned, it's easy enough to use. The keypad is nice and the jog wheel is very convenient for controlling the music player.
The i300 is designed as an iPod killer. With a 3 Gbyte hard disk and superb sound quality, it looks like it really could be one. The 3 Gybte disk offers as much storage as an iPod Nano, and the sound quality is excellent. There are twin stereo speakers with 3D surround sound, plus a stereo Bluetooth headset option. With a digital power amp and a graphic equaliser, sound quality really is as good as an iPod. The music player (Windows Media Player) supports a good range of formats too, including MP3, AAC, AAC+ and WMA. Because the phone uses Microsoft software, transferring music between PC and phone is really easy.
The screen is fantastic - a very bright high resolution 262k TFT display. The 1.3 megapixel camera and video camera are good enough, but fall behind competitors such as the Sony Ericsson W900i and the Nokia N91.
The connectivity of the phone is good with Bluetooth, USB and infra-red supported. The phone handles email with attachments (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF) and synchronises well with Outlook. Browsing the web is also easy using Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer, although this can be slow as there is no 3G or high-speed data, just GPRS.
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