Samsung Corby II Review

Introduction:

The Samsung Corby II, also known as the Samsung GT-S3850, is the successor to the original Corby, a low-end phone offered since September 2009, which stood out with its capacitive touchscreen, low price tag and hip looks. But these days, you can't impress with just a touchscreen, so has Samsung thrown more notable ingredients into the small and cute Corby II? The Koreans have included Wi-Fi and a larger, 3.14-inch QVGA screen, but the Samsung Corby II remains an affordable feature phone with a rather mediocre 2-megapixel camera. Is it worth considering? Stay with us as we walk you through the design and functionality before giving you our final verdict.

Design:

The original Corby stood out with its fresh hip design with easily interchangeable back plates and jazzy curves, but this kind of originality is nowhere to be seen in the Samsung Corby II. It just seems that the young and social first-gen Corby aged and is now more serious, starting from the conservative black and white variants of the back plate and ending with the classical square font in the menus.



You can compare the Samsung Corby II with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

But there is something else striking in the design of the second-gen Corby – it is a very, very close copy of the Samsung Galaxy mini. Sure – the three physical buttons on the front have changed in shape, the speakerphone on the back has moved and colors are different, but the shell is practically the same.

First, a 3.14-inch capacitive LCD screen greets you with its humble 240 x 320 pixels of resolution, resulting in a low pixel density and poor viewing angles. Up front, you'll also find the earpiece on top and three large and easy to press physical buttons.


Then, on the right, you have a slot for hot-swappable microSD cards of up to 16GB and a lock key, while the volume rocker resides on the left. The top of the device holds a lid-protected microUSB port and a 3.5mm standard headset jack. Finally, the patterned back plate is where the 2-megapixel fixed-focus camera and the speakerphone are.



To tally up the design, we'd say it's rather compact and practical as the patterned back won't let the handset slip easily. The design actually doesn't surprise us at all as its identical to the Galaxy mini. In all honesty, we liked the plastic yet sturdy build of the Galaxy mini, so we have no problem with the Corby II being near identical to it.

Interface and Functionality:

While design-wise, the Samsung Corby II is an almost exact copy of the Samsung Galaxy mini, the two phones are miles apart when it comes to functionality. The Galaxy mini is a low-end Android smartphone, which translates into a myriad of applications, widgets and extensions, while the Corby II is disappointingly left wandering in the sinking ship of touchscreen feature phones. The TouchWiz interface offers the basic functionality you'd expect – the call and messaging parts of it are rich in options, but when it comes to additional features you've pretty much reached a dead-end.

Overall, navigation in the menu was rather fluid, however we couldn't help but notice the slight lag accompanying flicking around. And then we noticed that there's no multitouch, no accelerometer, no themes, no fonts, no on-screen QWERTY keyboard and no useful YouTube client. We'd swallow the lack of multitouch – double tapping still works, but not including an accelerometer just puzzles us as you'd have to use an on-screen button in select apps like the gallery and the browser to go into landscape mode.


The lack of pre-installed themes or fonts wasn't a major letdown, but making do with the on-screen T9 keypad for typing text was a trip to the past. Even though, we've seen fairly good on-screen QWERTY keyboards on a similarly sized display, we couldn't find such input option on the Corby II.

To top the cake, we couldn't get YouTube videos to play as the icon in the menu doesn't act as a dedicated YouTube client, but rather redirects to the mobile version of the website which got stuck buffering every single time.


Enough of our gripes, though, on the positive side we found the Social Hub widget acting as a container for your Facebook/Twitter updates useful. We also appreciated the presence of a simple file manager. You can also view your documents or spreadsheets through the Picsel File Viewer, which doesn't support editing.



In terms of connectivity, Wi-Fi seems to be the biggest benefit of owning the second-gen Corby, but you can't do much with it. The phone comes with the Dolfin 2.0 browser which doesn't support Flash or multitouch. Don't expect surfing anything overly graphical – the phone runs out of memory quickly when you throw more content at it. 3G is a no-go as the phone only supports EDGE for data.



Camera and Multimedia:

The 2-megapixel camera on the Samsung Corby II is a fixed-focus unit with no flash. You shouldn't expect wonders from such a snapper and you don't get them. What you get however is a very basic camera that you may opt to use when you really want to capture that moment and you'd better hope that urge comes during the day when light is aplenty. Not surprisingly, the pictures lack detail, and turn out on the softer side, with some artifacts and noticeable noise getting in the way.

The biggest downer is the fixed-focus module used for the Corby II, which translates into blurry shots if you try to focus objects within a 20-inch range. Except for that however, all other objects are always in focus, and the time between firing up the camera and taking the shot is minimal.  The camera interface offers a decent amount of settings such as shooting modes (smile shot and panorama), white balance and exposure metering.



The 2-megapixel camera captures video at QVGA resolution. This should say it all, as 320x240-pixel footage is hardly useful.

Samsung Corby II Sample Video:



In terms of media playback, the handset handles only MPEG-4 encoded videos around its native resolution. The screen is on the small side, but it's still possible to kill some time, if you're on the road and have nothing better to do. The speakerphone is pretty loud and we were content with the quality of the sound, so you could definitely use the phone as an MP3 player, even more so given the fact that it has both FM radio with RDS and voice recording.

Performance and Conclusion:

In terms of call quality, the handset ranked rather average with no sound distortion as voices sounded natural and our callers reported hearing us well, but slightly hollow tones appeared in our conversations on some occasions. The battery life was above average, the phone can easily get you through two days of usage and more. The 1000mAh battery gives you talk time rated at about 9.5 hours, while in stand-by mode you can expect it to hit up to 19 days – all pretty satisfactory results.

Looking at the price of the Samsung Corby II, one ends up confident that the touchscreen feature phone is on its way to becoming history. The Corby II is a virtual copy of the Samsung Galaxy mini in nearly every aspect except for its lack of Android. While we can understand Samsung's intention to reap all the benefits of the popularity of its Corby brand, we'd be surprised if the second-gen Corby does well. At a current price of around $175 off contract, it's $40 cheaper than a full-fledged smartphone like the Galaxy mini, but those $40 extra dollars will buy you access to a myriad of apps, a better camera and usable browser. Looking at this phone, we realize the breakthrough Android made, eating up the low-cost touchscreen feature phone. Finally, the Corby II might have been a worthy alternative for price-savvy shoppers a year ago, but now it just seems irrelevant.

Samsung Corby II Video Review: