The first Samsung non-smart phones with a large touch screen were based on the Croix interface. It had a ton of drawbacks – monochrome, ugly and not very user-friendly.

Apparently, the manufacturer has decided to fix that and has developed new software, called TouchWiz. Its debut was in the F480, which is the subject of our review. This is a high-end device with a very attractive appearance, equipped with a 2.8” display, a 5-megapixel camera and HDSPA 7.2Mbps support.

Design

At first sight, the most impressive features Samsung F480 has are its compact size (3.9 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches (98 x 55 x 11.5 mm)) and the brushed metal, covering most of its body. The weight of 3.5 oz (101 g) is justified by the materials, which adds a nice feeling for solidness and dependability. 

Most of the front is taken by the 2.8” touch display, supporting a resolution of 240х320 pixels and 262k colors. It reacts only when touched by fingers (every touch can be accompanied by a sound and/or vibration), which is inconvenient when wearing gloves. Luckily, it has a great sensitivity, although a step behind the leader in this aspect – iPhone. The screen offers quite good colors, but there’s more to ask detail-wise. The same goes for using the phone in direct sunlight; it is usable, but the mirror-like effect prevents the user from seeing clearly.

Over the display, we have the video calling camera and the speaker, and under it are located the reject/accept buttons and one, activating the shortcut menu. They are all very user-friendly with the only thing being problematic is the lack of a clearly felt stroke when pressed.

There are only three more buttons to be found on the body – the volume rocker, for locking and the camera dedicated one. They are located respectively on the left (next to the microSD card slot), upper and right side (where is the charger/data cable/handsfree connector). The “hold” button is the only problematic one, assigned to lock/unlock the device. The trouble comes from its small size and the unpleasant pressing experience.

On the back of the phone is located the 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. As we’ve already mentioned, there are two options for the battery lid, but the metal one fits the overall look of the phone much better. Unfortunately, it will not protect the F480 from dust and fingerprints.

As a whole, Samsung F480 is one very attractive phone and it will surely draw people’s attention. Its clear design resembles the top fashion models – PRADA and Giorgio Armani.

User interface

The user interface of Samsung F480 is a good job. It's not the award-winning Croix UI we found on the recent touch-operated Samsung handsets we reviewed. However we are willing to give this one an award of ours It's lively, it's colorful and frankly, we were getting tired of flash phones insistently using only a couple of colors for the entire user interface. Furthermore, the addition of widgets allows a whole lot wider customization and improves user-friendliness.

The Widgets are basically a very convenient way for customizing your home screen. The Widget bar toggles on and off the home screen by pressing the arrow in the lower left corner.

The Widget bar itself includes a number of icons, which can be dragged onto the display and ordered to the user liking. If any is to be removed, all you need to do is drag it back to the bar.

Apart from the whole touch thing the Samsung F480 menu structure is not that different from other Samsung handsets. The only major difference is the added tab at the bottom of the display, which holds three keys with varying functionality. The icons are however more colorful and better looking than we are used to. There are also great animations used for the transitions and the other actions around the menu (selecting, scrolling).

The main menu displays as a 4 x 3 grid of icons. Sub-menus appear as lists. The much contested feature of all recent Samsung phones, whereby the last used items are highlighted by default when you open a submenu, is also present here. However due to the fact that the handset is touch-operated there is almost no difference what exactly is highlighted by default. Still, on some rare occasions when accessing longer lists this might save you some scrolling.

We are very pleased with the speed and responsiveness of the handset. Its whole interface is really snappy with no noticeable lags anywhere. The main menu is accessible from the stand-by display by pressing the right key on the tab at the bottom of the screen. You can also access it by pressing the confirmation key below the screen and then clicking the center icon on the screen.

The left and center key of the bottom tab are reserved for dialing a number and accessing the phonebook respectively. This of course is only true when the home screen or the main menu are displayed. The functionality of the three keys changes across different submenus.

The stand-by display of the F480 offers the typical Samsung layout. The top bar is reserved for standard readings like signal strength, battery status, network connectivity, ringing profile etc. As far as the rest of the display is concerned, it is entirely up to the user to decide which elements should be there and which should not.

A clock or a birthday reminder may be placed anywhere on the home screen. The operator logo and the small tabs controlling the music player and the FM radio can also be added or removed if needed. The available options are plenty but you should have got the idea by now. You can also have a quick look at the video demonstration about how the whole widgetry works.

Here you can save up to 1000 contacts with up to 5 numbers, including home, business and office. On top of that, you can add pictures, ringtones, birth date and a short note. Searching is done only by first name, which is a common problem, but is largely annoying when present in such a high-end device. In addition, only three names are visualized on the screen, which makes the navigation much more difficult. The contacts can be organized in groups with their own picture and ringtone. 

Organizer

Samsung F480 offers some rather useful options, to help you organize your day. From the main menu, you can set up to 5 alarms, to make sure you make it to work/school on time. In the calendar, you can store events (up to 100), divided in appointments (up to 50), anniversaries (up to 50), vacations, important and personal (the last three you can add up to 20 each). The calendar can be viewed as an entire month, week or day.

On top of that, from the applications menu, you are able to write short reminders and tasks (limited to 20). Here is the world clock, the calculator, the unit converter and the timer with a countdown timer. Everything that needs to be here is present. Its built in memory is 220 MB, and it is expandable via microSD cards. However, we experienced a strange problem; cards, which were operational in other phones, had to be formatted in the F480.

Camera

After we’ve witnessed some very good results from Samsung cameraphones such as G600, we expected a lot from F480. It takes about 3 seconds to start the software, after holding the button on the right side. Focusing is a fast process and takes approximately 1.5 seconds. The period between two pictures is relatively short too (3-4 seconds).

We were disappointed from the appearance of the interface – it is ugly, monochrome and not user-friendly. The upper part is taken by a row of icons, indicating the current settings. We accept that solution since the symbols are too small, to be easily pressed with fingers. There are four options on the lower row – to change the mode (camera/preset scenes /video recording), settings, gallery and return to the main menu.

The settings are not that much, but they are irrationally spread on a few pages. In order to get to the less frequently used settings such as ISO sensitivity, picture quality, and digital stabilizer, you’ll have to go to the second page and then, to “more settings”. Therefore, whenever you need to adjust one of those, you’ll have to make six taps on the screen, which is not that fast.

The only non-standard options offered by the camera are wide dynamic range, face detection and the smile shooting mode. The first one doesn’t actually do anything that important, but it simply increases the contrast in the darker areas of the pictures. You can actually get similar and even better results by using many computer programs. Once you turn the face detection on, the camera will stay focused on the face you’ve selected even if it moves. If the person you are trying to take a picture of walks outside of the camera range, the camera will try to find another face, and if there are no people in front of the lens, the autofocus is fully inactive. The Smile shooting mode looks for a smile and when it detects one it automatically captures the moment. Unfortunately, the function is not very precise and overall, it’s useless.

Since we recently had to review another 5-megapixel phone by the same manufacturer (Soul), we decided to compare the camera test results. The first thing we noticed was the difference in the file sizes. F480’s pictures are a bit over 1MB, meanwhile Soul’s are approximately 2MB. Nevertheless, the photographs made outdoors are of almost equal quality, good detail and color reproduction. Soul is a master of the fine detail, but F480’s captures are not back either.
  
The Indoor result were quite disappointing – even with bright lighting in place, there was a slight blur and some noise (same like with Soul). We recommend using the flash even when there are other light sources present, to help the camera focus. Unfortunately, it creates unpleasant shining when snapping close-ups and from far away, it doesn’t enhance the overall quality. There is no Macro mode, but that doesn’t stop the phone from focusing very well at extremely short distances, which will allow you to take detailed close-up pictures.
   
The videos recorded are with a 320х240 pixels resolution and 15 fps – these having become a standard for most cameraphones and even the ones from the entry level. It would have been good if it could record at 640x480 pixels or at least 30 fps. The quality is not impressive, especially if you are shooting indoors.

As a whole, we liked the camera, because it is fast and makes good outdoor pictures. However, the interface is not user-friendly and the quality of the photographs made indoors is poor. It is sad to have a 5-megapixel camera and not be able to use it at a party or even in a bar.

Multimedia
  
As every self-respecting high-class device, F480 has music and video player. The music player has two versions – one taking up the entire screen, and which is accessible from the main menu and a second one that is visualized as a widget.

In the first one, under the album cover and the track info now playing, there are four buttons. They are used to rate the track, access the equalizer, for switching to shuffle mode and changing the playing mode (repeat, folder repeat). You can sort tracks by the number of times played, artist, genre, album, composer. Overall, the interface is easy to use but has unattractive “antique” design. The simple functionality (fast forward, play/pause) is accessible via the widget player.

Unfortunately, the same weak speaker you use during a call is employed for sound reproduction. A light metal crackling noise is heard when at maximum volume. The sound in the receiver is also pretty quiet, but with good quality. There is no 3.5 mm jack included in the package so you’ll have use the standard earphones, which are not very comfortable and don’t even have external volume control. As a whole, the music quality is a bit over the average.

The model is equipped with an FM radio, which needs the handsfree to be plugged in, because it is used as an antenna. The radio has automatic search, which however is not very adequate and during our tests it was constantly finding stations with noise only. Unfortunately, you cannot enter the names of your favorites.

It would have been better if we could use the 2.8” display to watch videos. For that purpose F480 is equipped with a simple video player. It visualizes MPEG4 files (coded in the modern h.264 or h.263) and if they are with resolution up to 240х320 this is done trouble free. Unfortunately, even at a normal frame rate per second (24) the sound doesn’t correspond to the picture and some screens are skipped. Overall, the phone is not suitable for watching quality videos, which is totally unacceptable for such a high-end device.
 
Besides the regular voice recorder, in the applications menu you also have a video editor. It has an extremely uncomfortable interface and the only thing, which it will allow you to do is create videos from pictures (adding sound as well) or to modify existing ones. The only formats supported are 3gp for video and amr for sound, and there is no way а to add effects, which makes this function pointless.

You have an option similar to the Track ID (seen in Sony Ericsson), called Music Recognition. It didn’t work when we tested it, saying that the Internet server is “temporarily offline”.

Conclusion

It's not too often that we are so impressed with a handset as we are with Samsung F480. The little fella is an extremely capable device carrying a serious feature pack. In addition, it is so suave and compact that it is bound to earn itself quite a lot of fans. User-friendliness is also among its definite strong points. Some users might miss the Armani logo for the frill of it but we for one won't really grieve over it.

5 megapixel camera, 2.8" touchscreen display and HSDPA ring the right bells in the tech-freaks' minds. Those are however hardly the people to go for Samsung F480. After all, there are still one or two absences in its specs sheet.

Instead, the F480 is targeted at people that want a good all-round device, which won't tear a whole in their pocket. With the camera white balance fixed in the retail version, which seems imminent, Samsung F480 will also be a tempting purchase for the cameraphone lovers.