Samsung Giorgio Armani Review

Messaging:

Options for sending messages are altogether standard – you can compose text, multimedia messages, and e-mails. There is option for separate Text or Multimedia templates and there are some preloaded for the second type.

Typing a new message in done via the on-screen numeric keypad. It is just like with a normal phone, the only difference being that the keyboard is visualized on the display. You can either type by pressing the key until you get to the desired letter, or by using T9 predictive text input system. An interesting feature is that, if you use the triple-tap method, the characters will change with each pressing, reflecting the changed option.

A wizard tries to help when the settings for email are input, by “predicting” the email servers from the username. Unfortunately it isn’t based on real information about different popular servers (such as Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc) and doesn’t really give the proper settings each time. Once the email is (manually) set, one can configure the settings for downloading. The emails can be limited to download headers only (or whole content) as well as by traffic: up to 100, 200 or 300KB.


Connectivity:

The Giorgio Armani-Samsung phone is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) and, unfortunately, only one frequency can be used in the USA, which means that its use will be restricted to some areas only. Like the Prada, 3G support is missing.

Unlike the Prada which only featured WAP browser, Samsung Georigio Armani disposes of a full HTML internet browser that renders the pages as on a computer. The main problem here is the slow data, which means that a heavy HTML page will take almost age to load through the EDGE, instead of through 3G, which the phone lacks. Once it happens, you can move around the page either by touching it and pointing in any of the directions, or by using the arrows. The inconvenient thing is that it doesn’t really “move” around the page but moves to the next (in the direction) link. An option allows you to fit the whole page on the screen and then zoom on selected area, similar to the iPhone, which helps you to easily navigate to the part you want to see.


For wired connection to a computer, the phone comes with USB cable in the box. Once the phone is connected, it asks you to choose one of three modes: PC Studio, Media player, Mass storage. The last one is most convenient for data transfer, while the first is used for synchronization with the software from the phone set.