Samsung SGH-F400 Review

Nowadays, you can often see people on the street with earphones or just playing music from a loudspeaker. For that purpose, some of individuals do not use music players but their mobile phones. With F400, its stereo loudspeakers and the Bang&Olufsen ICEpower amplifier, Samsung targets precisely that group. It is a dual slider, presented by the manufacturer with quite a few superlatives and should provide a “highest-quality sound”, immediately making it an attractive solution even for the most pretentious consumers.

Design:

It looks like a cute phone for young people, but that’s it. Unfortunately, the materials used for the make create the feeling for something cheap when you hold it in your hand. At least it is comfortable, despite its size and weight.



You can compare Samsung SGH-F400 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.



On the front, we have the 2.2” TFT display with QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) resolution and 262k colors. The picture looks beautiful and bright but unfortunately in direct sunlight the glass covering the screen transforms into a mirror and nothing can be seen. Besides, it scratches easily which is very annoying. It “took us” about an hour of carrying it in a pocket with some keys to get some streaks.

From all navigational buttons, only the 5-way D-pad is not standard and is a rotating wheel. The same means of navigation are used in other models of the manufacturer like U700 and Juke. All buttons are easy to press and clearly felt.

The sliding mechanism of this dual slider is relatively shaky and doesn’t look very reliable. Pushing it down reveals the two stereo loudspeakers and at the same time, activates the music menu (more about it in Interface). Moving it in the opposite direction discovers the keyboard with purple backlight. All its keys are easily distinguished and pressed.


On the left side, we see the volume controls and the microSD slot. The opposite one houses the camera and music shortcuts, accompanied by the charger slot.

On the top, hidden under a lid, is hiding the 3.5 mm earphones jack and the strap hole. The 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash is on the back, which is made out of rubber coated plastic for a better grip.

Interface:

Samsung SGH-F400’s interface is nice and user-friendly. It is similar to the one seen in the other models of the manufacturer and nothing will surprise you. Only when choosing the Violet scheme, the main menu changes its appearance similar to the Espresso theme in G600.

The phonebook can store up to 1000 contacts, including multiple numbers for each, e-mail, additional information, picture, ringtone, group and date of birth. Unfortunately, there is no second name search. .


The dialing screen can be personalized according to few criteria: font size and color, and background color. Upon inputting digits, an automatic search is activated that looks for matches in the numbers entered and they appear on the screen. In addition, you have the option to manually search through the names (for example, if you have a contact NЕО, type 6-3-6 and choose that option, it will appear as a result).



The main menu houses the Calendar, which can be viewed by month, week or a day. This allows you to easily plan ahead with options to select the type of event (appointment, holiday or task). Each one of them has a start and end time, location, reminding alarms and a repetition option day/week/month.


The rest of the organizing functions, which we know from the other models of the manufacturer, are located in the Applications submenu.

F400 is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900), which makes it fully usable only in Europe and Asia. The 3G support makes us think that the browser should be good. It allows you to see the pages using Smart-Fit (they appear in a column) or Desktop view (as in a PC) and you can zoom in/out. Navigating is relatively fast, but it would have been better if there was Pan view as well. Heavy sites like ours for example, load and appear correctly but the memory is not sufficient and some pictures do not open. Overall, this browser performs little above average and is usable, but we have seen better in the middle class (like in Sony Ericsson G502 or Samsung L770).


To connect locally, you can either use the Bluetooth 2.0 or the USB cable. The phone also supports A2DP, which allows the wireless transfer of stereo music.

Multimedia:

The camera interface is user-friendly. The overall picture quality is bad, because the colors are pale and not well-saturated, and the detail level is low. Although the phone is not pretentious in this aspect, the performance of the 3-megapixel camera is quite disappointing.



The camcorder can record videos not larger than 320 x 240 pixels and 15 fps. However, you can choose between 3GP and MP4 format. The quality is not good enough to even use them in sites like YouTube.

Samsung SGH-F400 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution
* Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.

Pushing the slider down activates a vertical menu which gives access only to the multimedia functions of the phone: the music player, the FM radio with RDS and the video player.

The first one is a key feature in F400 and we hope it will not disappoint us. It offers quite some options. In addition to the standard sorting (by artist, genre, albums, and composers), there also is an option to filter tracks by last played songs, all, playlists, recently played, most frequently played and podcasts.

When listening to music you also have many functions to choose from: repeat one or all, shuffle, you can rate and add to a playlist. Besides those, in the settings you will find equalizer, background play, Fade out stop and three different visualizations. As a whole, the music player is quick and trouble-free.

The FM radio with RDS is user-friendly as well. Besides the standard options, you will have automatic search of the radio you are listening to in case you move to another region and Radio text.

F400 is equipped with track recognizing software which will give you information on the song you are listening to from the radio or in a club. It works similarly to Sony Ericsson’s TrackID. It’ll record 10 seconds from a tune, send it to a server via Internet and it will get back the result with the album art of the song. During our tests, the software did an excellent job.

The Bang&Olufsen ICE power amplifier should boost the sound quality of the loudspeaker, but it actually doesn’t. The music is loud but not as clear as we expected. Our test unit came without headphones but we took advantage of the 3.5 mm jack and used a good pair. In contrast to a PC with a mid-level sound card, F400 is much worse and we were left disappointed. It came out that the „best sound quality” tag was not true, because compared to the other music-oriented phones the Samsung performs average.

The video player can reproduce files with QVGA resolution max and we recommend converting them into H264 (H263 also supported) and 24 fps. This will guarantee much better results.

Performance:

Samsung F400 is fast without any lag during the “walks” in the menus and when starting various applications.

Unfortunately, the sound quality during a talk is average. You and the collocutor will hear everything with a good volume, but the voices will be monotonous and quite sharp at times. Also, there is a permanent background noise. The most annoying thing however, was the inexplicable fading away of the sound at your end of the line, because it makes every word hard to understand and the collocutor will have to repeat everything. On top of that, the loudspeaker is useless.

According to the official data, the battery is supposed to provide up to 4.5 hours of talks and 600 hours in standby mode. The first value, compared to the other music-oriented phones is low but the second one is very good.

Conclusion:

The manufacturer presents Samsung F400 with many superlatives regarding the sound (”best quality”). The truth is that despite the Bang&Olufsen ICEpower amplifier, the music quality is average when using the speakers and headphones. This is a big problem for such a pretentious music phone and that’s why we wouldn’t recommend F400. We think that Sony Ericsson W890 is a much better choice, offering better sound in the same price range. However, if you like the dual-slider form-factor, you may give this one a go.