24 Oct 09 NR Review: Samsung S7550 Blue Earth
For once in a blue moon designers and developers of mobile have seemed to practice what we have all been concerned about “Recycling”. Samsung Blue Earth as the name goes is a solar powered, eco-friendly phone that promotes green thinking. It has been built over recycled water bottles and even its packaged box is made out of recycled paper. It is the first solar powered touchscreen which has used “eco mode” to use the display in an energy efficient manner. The other most impressing feature of this mobile is that the calendar has all environment related information pre-stored.
The retails box as already discussed is the point from where recycling has begun; the box looks really well finished and contains room only for the major necessities like charger, headset and user manual.
As far as the design and construction have been considered, the phone sticks very close to Samsung Corby. The exterior of the phone doesn’t bore any sign of a recycled material. The round edges and color shades look very appealing. The front panel is completely dominated by the 3’’ display, supporting up to 16M colors. Being built on a capacitive technology, the response to sweeps, touch is considerably good. The screen resolution is considerably not too good, especially in case of some special images where this could be identified very clearly.
Below the display stands two keys “Call” and “”End Call”. The shutter key and Hold key are placed in a single long button keeping the camera key a little raised to ensure proper handling. USB headset port is placed on the top right corner. The back panel of the phone which is usually occupied by camera lens is now being shared by the solar panel, which helps getting charged. There is a small blue LED close to the camera, just to let the users know that the mobile is getting charged. But on the whole the design and finish of blue earth are really very good and acceptable.
As far as the user interface is concerned the designers have done justice. The interface is much similar like the Jet – gives three different non scrollable screens between which we can keep swapping. Each of this homescreen can be filled up with widgets you want and this makes it possible that you can access everything inside your phone without the need to use the “Menu”. There are a couple of features like Eco walk – tells you the number of steps you walked. AccuWeather widget that tells you the weather at the local place and also displays clock of 2 different time zones.
The other new thing about the phone was “Eco Unlock”, to unlock the phone there is a soda can and a thrash bin where you will have to pick up the soda can and drop it into the bin, which unlocks your mobile. Though the mechanism is really simple but the way they have tried to tell people about keeping the earth clean is really appreciated. Phonebook supports up to 2000 contacts. Phone contacts can also be used in a way where the contact photos are displayed and they are arranged in an arc fashion where you can scroll easily and choose the contact photo of the person you have to call.
Messaging is also pretty simple, and one best feature is as you send a message a small chunk of information is added to the message that you send intimating the recipient what is very special about this day in relation to the environment. The gmail settings weren’t automatically detected, and had to get it configured manually.
The music player is good and hasn’t seen much of a change from S5230. It allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If all this doesn’t seem enough you can also create your own playlist. The audio quality seems to be pretty decent.
Frequency response +0.20, -2.62
Noise level -84.4
Dynamic range 84.4
THD 0.281
IMD + Noise 0.181
Stereo crosstalk -75.1
Video player does really perform well all the basic functionalities. But it is the screen size that doesn’t seem to be supporting the device to render the best of what it can. The 3.15mpx camera is fixed focus and lacks the feature of auto focus. Pushing the camera doesn’t click the photo immediately, instead it waits for the person in the frame to smile and there goes the shot.
On the whole the phone has best finished and is sure to go places like, the 5800 and 5530 of Nokia’s. When time is turning to reusable form of energy, why can’t our mobiles also do the same? The phone is worth its price and package and the features that it offers.
Key Features
- Solar panel for battery charging
- GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12, UMTS 900/2100, HSDPA 3.6Mbps
- 3″ capacitive TFT touchscreen, WQVGA resolution (240 x 400 pixels)
- 180MB onboard storage, microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
- Wi-Fi, GPS with A-GPS support
- 3.15 megapixel fixed focus camera with smile detection and QVGA @ 30fps video recording
- Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
- Document viewer
- Exchange ActiveSync support
- Smart unlock
- Accelerometer sensor
- FM radio with RDS
- Music recognition service
Dis-advantages
- Could’ve been slightly thinner
- The screen is poorly visible in the sun
- 3 MP fixed focus camera is outdated
- Grip and handling compromised by the solar panel
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Tags: Blue Earth, S7550 Blue Earth, Samsung Blue Earth, Samsung S7550, Samsung S7550 Blue Earth
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