Samsung SCH-i760 Review

Camera:

The i760 comes with a low-quality 1.3MP Camera and meaningless flash. It can be activated by going through the Programs menu, or by simply pressing the dedicated camera button on the right edge of the phone. The program only takes 2 seconds to load, and uses the entire display in landscape mode as a viewfinder, with option icons located across the top of the screen. When capturing an image there is a 2 second delay, and another 3 second delay when saving it. Picture quality is what one would expect from a 1.3MP Camera. Outdoor images have soft edges, and are lacking in detail and color saturation, with indoor images suffering the same symptoms, aggravated by low-light and an Auto White Balance feature that requires manual settings. Once images are saved (either to the phone or microSD card) you can view them in the Album.




The i760 is not a high-end “camera phone” by any means, and the only area that we did enjoy was the layout of the available options:

• Mode: Camera, Camcorder
• Shooting Mode: Single Shot, Mosaic Shot, Multi Shot
• Resolution: 1280x960, 640x480, 320x240, 160x120
• Quality: Super Fine, Fine, Normal, Economy
• White Balance: Auto, Sunny, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent
• Flash: Off, On, Only this Shot
• Timer: 2 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec
• Color Effects: Normal, B&W, Negative, Sepia
• Settings & Tools: Automatic Save, Icon Display, Storage, Timeout, Shutter Sound

Multimedia:

The i760 is equipped with a standard mobile version of Windows Media Player, which is a multimedia player for music and video files. The popular MP3 format is supported, as well as WMA and WAV. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.

The supported video formats include MPEG4/H.263, WMV and 3GP, while the quality of the latter is pretty low. They can be viewed in fullscreen and the picture quality is quite good and looks very nice on the 2.8” display.

There are three methods of listening to music with the i760: the built-in speaker, 2.5mm headset, or Bluetooth headsets. The built in speaker does a poor job, with a lot of distortion heard even at medium volume levels. At full volume, the sound is loud but the distortion is so overpowering that there is no enjoyment in listening to music. A much better option would be to use a 2.5mm wired headset or wireless Bluetooth A2DP headset.


Windows Media Player (WMP) can be controlled either by using the stylus with onscreen buttons or the D-pad. With the onscreen controls, there are the regular buttons: play/pause, fast-forward, rewind, skip, go-back, volume up and down. Using the D-pad, up and down will control the volume, Left sends you back to the beginning of the song or the previous song when pressed but if held will rewind, and Right will skip to the next song when pressed or will fast-forward when held. Both rewind and fast-forward skip the song at 5 second intervals and do this very quickly. The center button acts as the play/pause button.

If a call is coming through, WMP will pause the song and then resume it once the conversation is over. The music player can also play in the background while other functions are being performed. This is one feature that we truly enjoy, as only Smartphones and the LG Chocolate is capable of “background music” playback.


Software:

The Samsung i760 comes equipped with 128MB of Flash ROM and 64MB of RAM, but you can increase the phones memory by installing a microSD card up to 2GB in size.

Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Unlike the Motorola Q9m, we were able to view most Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents without any problems. Unfortunately, the i760 does not come with Adobe PDF Reader preloaded, which we do not understand since most other WM devices come with it installed. But instead comes with a program called Picsel Viewer, that can view a wide variety of files including PDF. There also are only two preloaded games that come bundled with Windows Mobile 6: Solitaire and Bubble Breaker, but new applications can be downloaded and added.