Samsung D900 Review

You can tell we love the phone, so let's get on with the reasons why. Firstly, this is the world's slimmest slider phone (now beaten by the Samsung U600!). Samsung have really perfected the slide design, and the D900 is silky smooth. The physical appearance of the phone is unbeatable, with a lovely magnesium surface coating and a small but functional keypad making the phone very tactile and easy to use. The LG Chocolate and the Samsung E900 may look cool with their touch-sensitive keypads, but you can't beat the ease-of-use of a conventional keypad. At just 13mm thickness, the D900 even beats the Motorola RAZR in the thinness charts.

Looks aren't everything however, so let's move on to the next reason for choosing the D900 - its 3 megapixel camera with autofocus. This is simply the best camera currently available in any phone after the Sony Ericsson K800i. It gives results of amazing clarity, and what is really astounding is that Samsung have fitted their best ever camera in their thinnest slider phone! We are in awe. The video camera is also of high quality and records in MPEG4 format. The display on the D900 is very finely detailed with outstanding clarity and does full justice to the camera. Some reviewers are mistaken in believing that videos cannot be viewed in full screen, but they can - just press 1 to switch to full screen mode.

Next the music player. This handles a good range of formats - MP3, ACC, ACC+ and e-AAC+ - and has very good sound reproduction with 3D virtual surround sound and a digital power amplifier. The player is easy to use with playlists of up to 30 tracks. You can use the stereo headset supplied by Samsung or a wireless Bluetooth headset. The built-in memory is 70 Mbytes, which is enough to get started, but if you're serious about using the phone as an MP3 player you can buy a Micro SD card - a 512 Mbyte card costs around £15. The only real downside on the music front is that there's no radio included.

The phone has all the usual features that you'd expect - messaging, email, MP3 ringtones, speakerphone, Java games, etc, etc. The full spec is listed below. There are a few bonus features - a document viewer for viewing MS Office files, offline mode for use when listening to music on a plane, a TV-Out connection for viewing images directly on a TV screen, and EDGE for fast internet access. Connectivity is via Bluetooth or fast USB. The user interface is very nice and friendly, with a new menu design featuring a black background - very smart. Battery life is good. One gripe is that you can't use an MP3 for the SMS alert sound (same with all Samsungs), but good news - you can select vibrate and ring simultaneously.

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