I’ve had my Samsung Star for a week or so now and damn this phone is simply awesome! (particularly when you realise I got it on a contract that’s only costing me R69 per month! :D)
The Samsung Star (also know as the Tocco Lite) is the lower end of Samsung’s latest round of touchscreen phone releases, but this doesn’t mean it is a push-over, that’s for sure. Despite the disadvantage of not supporting 3G and also having a fairly average camera with no flash, the Star weighs in at a more than usable 104 x 53 x 11.9 mm size and 93.4 g weight, features a 3″ resistive TFT touchscreen with a WQVGA resolution of 240 x 400 pixels, 50MB onboard storage with support for an up to 16GB microSD card, a 3 megapixel fixed focus camera (with the awesome facial recognition smile detection functionality built in), support for Bluetooth 2.1, a FM radio receiver and an accelerometer sensor just for good measure.
Combine this with a crystal clear speaker and microphone, a very user-friendly interface (apart from its not so intuitive scrolling mechanism), and all the usual applications and gadgets you’ve come to expect from a modern phone, the Samsung Star is really proving to be quite a piece of art, making it no wonder that the Star is currently shipping around a million units per month!
I love the responsive and rather accurate touchscreen input system that gives you feedback via either vibration or sound whenever a successful press is initiated, and up to this point in time, I’ve yet to press a wrong “button”. The accelerometer is a nifty little trick as well, giving you access to various options and alternatives by simply swivelling the phone onto its side or back to its normal position again, similar to what you would do with an iPod or iPhone for that matter.
For example, create a SMS and when holding the phone upright, you interact with a normal cellphone button input system. Turn it to its side however and you get to play with a full qwerty keyboard!
The phone comes in with a built in document viewer and also hinges well on its selling-point of being able to seamlessly connect to a myriad of today’s most popular social media websites (FaceBook and Flickr for example), making direct sharing of content to these sites as painless as possible (though truth be told, I haven’t really made the time to play with this feature all that much just yet!). Added on top of this is a nifty “gesture” feature that allows you to tie certain functionality into specific gestures, such as using a “U” shape to unlock the phone for example, and of course, then there’s the pretty decent handwriting recognition functionality to take into consideration as well!
“So battery life?”, I hear you ask.
Well amazingly enough, this little guy just seems to go on and on forever. So far I’ve only had to recharge it once since owning it! And with all the sights, sounds and colours to be experienced, that’s pretty damn amazing if you ask me.
So, if you want a more in depth review, I suggest you check out the GSMArena team’s VERY comprehensive review up at www.gsmarena.com – I on the other hand haven’t even bothered reading it in full yet, simply put, that’s how happy I am with my shiny new gadget! :)
Related link: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_s5230_star-review-372.php