Since the iPhone first arrived, touchscreen mobiles have been much in vogue, so it's no great surprise that Samsung's first luxury fashion-branded phone - a collaboration with Giorgio Armani - is a tap-to-control device. The Prada Phone by LG set the agenda last year, and Samsung has followed its Korean rival with a phone that echoes that handset's sleek and simple appearance.
The Giorgio Armani branding sets this phone out as an unashamedly fashion-conscious mobile, with even its luxury packaging and in-box accessories aimed at creating an exclusive aura about the phone. Beneath its admittedly attractive dark grey bronze tinted skin, this mobile brings into play Samsung's recently introduced Croix touchscreen user interface, with haptic feedback (vibrating when you touch the screen). This is all presented on a large 2.6-inch QVGA 262k-colour screen.
The fact that this display is smaller than the one used on Nokia's non-touch N95 8GB (a 2.8-incher) reflects the petite size of the Armani handset. It measures a compact 87.5mm(h) x 54.5mm(w) and is just 10.5mm slim, weighing in at a lightweight 85g.
Its size doesn't prevent Samsung from slipping in a 3-megapixel camera on the back panel, a music player, MicroSD card expansion slot and a full web browser. This Giorgio Armani Samsung off-the-peg number though doesn't have 3G inside - it's a tri-band GSM GPRS/EDGE handset - and nor does it employ Wi-Fi connectivity, trimming away potential high-speed downloading, web-browsing and video calling.
The elegant design of this phone obviously gives a nod to the iPhone. It's built with aluminium and stainless steel, so the device feels solid and substantial too. But the Samsung Croix UI isn't smart enough to go toe-to-toe with Apple's touch controlled mobile.
Out of the box, the standby screen of the Giorgio Armani phone has a default chequered background, with a selection of small icons that can be tapped to activate the phone's functionality. There's also a calendar displayed, which can swapped for a clock with the sweep of a finger across the screen (or removed completely with a tweak in the settings menus).
There's no slideaway keypad on this device, so most control action - including numberpad tapping - happens on the touchscreen. One of the small icons on the top left of the display pulls up the large numberpad onscreen. Tap in a number, press the physical call button beneath the display and your call's made. That button can also be tapped to pull up recent contacts you've called, texted or been called or texted by, helping speed up regular number punching.
Another icon on the top left enables you to switch silent mode on or off, while the centre symbol pulls up the main menu that's at the heart of the phone's Croix UI. In the centre of the display, another square icon pulls up a shortcuts screen - a cross shaped pattern of square buttons enabling four quick access functions (music player, contacts, messages and cal log) plus a key for the main menu in the centre.
Besides the front facing call and end pads, there are a couple of other side keys - a Hold button for locking or unlocking the touchscreen, and a camera activation button.
Working out the touch operated user interface is fairly straightforward, as it's based on the menu structures used on recent Samsung mid-range phone, even including numbered sub-menu lists (although without the number keys to fast-access them). The main menu is a familiar grid of icons representing options. When you press an icon, two bands running across the screen (top to bottom and side to side), cross to highlight the option you've chosen.
Graphically, it's quite a neat theme that's carried over to other elements such as the music player, although not strictly required for menu functionality. Virtual softkeys along the bottom of the display are there to help select or navigate.
Once you're into the sub menus, the option lists often require you to scroll down the screen. You can do this using a scroll bar to the side of the display, or by moving your finger down the options - being careful not to apply too much pressure and select one inadvertently.
There's not much room for finger error on the compact 2.6-inch display, and it takes a little getting used to to scroll up or down efficiently. It's certainly not as responsive or refined a system as the iPhone in that respect; the sub-menu lists feel like a standard phone menu system bolted on to a touchscreen user interface rather than as part of a from-the-ground-up designed UI.
The implementation of text messaging and email typing is oddly inefficient too. Some will no doubt find it hair-pullingly irritating. Looking up contacts for messages is fine, adding image etc, all OK. Typing text though requires you to compose a message on a tiny part of the display above the phone-style onscreen numberpad you use for typing out texts. With predictive text on, you can only see one line of text, which disappears from view once you've tapped in a few words. You get to see two lines with T9 off, but that doesn't help a whole heap if you're composing a longer message - you have to keep swipping back through what you've written if you want to see and edit it.
Once you've saved text, it is pasted onto the message - though if you want to add more, it's back to the entry page again. Editing messages is far too labour intensive. And in the editor page, the button that pulls up symbols is adjacent to a back button that will lose any text if pressed accidentally - potential for frustration is high, to begin with at least.
With a 1GB MicroSD card supplied in the box to with 60MB of internal storage, and a decent music player software inside, you can enjoy a bit of light relief by rolling some of your music collection onto the phone. It can accommodate MicroSDs up to 2GB, and these can be slipped into a slot on the side of the phone, protected by a plastic bung.
The music player sorts tracks under familiar categories, with tracks listed under recently played, most played, albums, artists, genres, composers and playlists. They can be side-loaded using Samsung PC Studio software, or copied onto the memory card with the phone in Mass Storage mode, using an in-box USB cable. In addition, it can sync easily with music in Windows Media Player 11 on a PC.
Tune playback sounds bright and reasonably detailed through the headphones supplied, though the top-end can sound slightly dominant and harsher at higher volumes. There's no standard headphone socket for easily upgrading the headset; Samsung uses its own-brand combined charger/headphone/data connection that precludes slotting in a regular 3.5mm jack.
Stereo Bluetooth is supported, enabling you to choose appropriately stylish wireless headphones, or stream tunes to Bluetooth speakers. If you want to dash that stylish aura altogether, though, you could try using the phone's tinny loudspeaker.
Despite its slimness, Samsung has managed to cram a 3-megapixel camera with LED flash into the back of the phone. Activated by the side button (or from the menu), it's operated by touching and tapping onscreen icons. There are not too many to get your head around, with a relatively short list of camera setting adjustments compared to a heavyweight shooter like the Samsung G800.
White balance, ISO and exposure metering can be changed from the automatic setting, and flash switched on or off, plus there are a few colour effects and frames you can add. You can adjust picture quality up with various settings up to 2048x1536 pixels.
There's no autofocus or close-up macro shooting facility here, although there is a 4x digital zoom. Picture quality can be pretty good in decent lighting conditions, although the fixed lens isn't Samsung's best shooter in low-light - even allowing for the flash. With indoors shots, colours can appear flat and pictures not as crisp as they should be. Some outside shots in dull light can show some small edging artifacts on bright subjects. You can get printable snaps, however, when light is bright.
One irritation though is the time it takes to display pictures that you've taken and saved on your memory card. For some reason, it takes a while to process and pull pics out, making browsing images on the memory card a touch frustrating. Pics stored on the phone can, by contrast, be looked through at the swipe of a finger.
(You can see a more detailed rundown of camera features, plus examples of shots taken with the Giorgio Armani Samsung phone in our related article Giorgio Armani Samsung Phone camera samples.)
Video capture quality on this device is average, with images recorded at a maximum resolution of 352x288 pixels showing up as typically low standard mobile footage. Downloaded or sideloaded video however is much better quality and very acceptable, and can played back in full-screen landscape mode for best effect.
The Giorgio Armani-Samsung doesn't just do style and multimedia; there's an email client for using with standard email accounts. Tapping in text here is, unsurprisingly a similar experience to regular text messaging. Attachments can be sent and received though, and viewed via an integrated document viewer; other files copied onto the phone can also be perused onscreen.
Samsung has included a NetFront Browser v3.4 full web browser in the spec too, and despite the lack of 3G high speed connectivity it works well, resolving pages tidily enough and surprisingly quickly for a non-smartphone GPRS handset. You can change the size of web pages, with arrow touch keys beneath the web page enabling you to scroll up, down or across. A Page Pilot option allows you to get an overview of the page, with a target box you can manipulate to home in on the part of the page you want to see. You can also choose between a full desktop style view and a more mobile-orientated Smart-Fit view
The standard fare of organiser type functionality is included here; there's a calendar (prominent on the standby page), voice memo recorder, memo note maker, calculator, convertor application and world clock, stopwatch and timer. There's also a touch-operated PhotoPuzzle game, the kind of kids' game where you have to move mixed up squares on a grid to make the right picture from your stored photos.
Call quality is fine on this phone, although in can sound sharp and a bit too harsh at louder volumes. Battery life for the Giorgio Armani-Samsung phone is suggested by Samsung to run at a reasonable 220 hours standby or impressive 6 hours talktime. In our tests, battery life wasn't an issue in standard usage, with charging required along normal patterns.
There are some excellent elements to the Giorgio Armani-Samsung phone; the build quality is first class, and its elegant small and slimline design are extremely attractive. Its music player is a good effort too, and it has a reasonably good mid range set of features for a non-3G phone - similar to Samsung's Ultra range. Samsung's early implementation of its touchscreen Croix UI is far from perfect however. Easy usuability should match such a stylish phone, but users may find the system unforgiving and not user-friendly enough - particularly now that Apple's set the bar for what a touchscreen user interface can be like.
