The Armani touch screen mobile phone will suit all fashion conscious users who want to stand out with their new sleek phone. Samsung have been inspired by the Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani when designing this stunning handset. The phone comes in a beautiful silver & black coloured casing which comes with a large high colour 2.6 Inch touch screen. The touch screen has a high screen resolution & provides the user with high quality touch screen controls. The Samsung Armani has a similar design to the LG KE850 Prada, LG KU990 Viewty & Apple iPhone which are also touch screen mobile phone which are proving to be popular with users of all ages. The user can access the QWERTY keyboard which is situated under the touch screen & can be easily slid out when needed by the user. The Armani phone is lightweight without feeling flimsy as it weighs 85 grams. The handset feels good to hold when using the touch screen as it measures 10.5mm in depth, 54.5mm in width & 87.5mm in length. The phone comes with sixty Mbytes of built in memory & with an expandable memory slot which allows the user to add a MicroSD™ memory card to suit the user's storage requirements.

Design

You will definitely notice the Armani phone ones you see it. It is different but in the good way: as it can be expected from a phone branded under the Armani name, it is highly stylish and pleasant both for the eye and the hand. It is very small and thin, comes in unique color and has metal battery cover, which helps for both the great feel and look.

Having in mind it is slim candybar with touch screen that occupies most of the front side, it reminds us of the other fashion-phone – the LG PRADA. Still, the Giorgio Armani is smaller and slimmer and instead of black comes in unique color scheme.

Almost the entire front side is occupied by the touch sensitive 2.6 inch display with QVGA resolution. It is surrounded by dark-colored area covered with one-piece glass, and below is the GIOGIO ARMANI logo, while the one of Samsung is only on the back. This once again reminds us of the PRADA phone by LG, as both phones show the fashion brand label on their fronts. The display is used for controlling of the device as both numeric and navigation keys are missing. It responds to the touch of a finger by the electricity that runs over the skin, so must be used with finger only, not with any artificial pointer (pen for example). Although it is far from being as responsive as the display of the iPhone, it is good in this respect for most people and it will be rare to touch it without response. We say for most people, because there are some who are exceptions and the display reacts worse to their touch. With standard display that is activated by the physical touch, there isn't such case.

The display is good enough for the purpose of the phone and the preloaded images look very well on it. Still, once you are out, prepare to manage with some visibility issues, especially if it is not clean but covered with fingerprints.

On the metal surface on the left are the protruding volume rocker and the microSD slot while on the right are the camera key, hold (lock/unlock) button and the slot for charger/cable connection. As expected, all they are part of the design, and our only complaint is that if you don't look directly at the right side, there is a possibility to press the camera key instead of the almost flat HOLD. It is unpleasant to wait for the camera to start when you actually want to lock the device; Samsung may have avoided that if the HOLD button was in the place of the connector and vice verse.

Once again just as in the PRADA, the camera rather ruins the look of the back side. Although here it is less noticeable than in the LG phone, we still think it could be "hidden" better, as in the KRZR K1 from Motorola for example. Additionally, it is slightly bulging, which makes it the first and probably only drawback of the design.

Interface

All information and buttons on the home screen are visualized over semi-transparent black background so they can be seen no matter the background image. The Armani phone comes with a selection of great looking wallpapers but if you cannot decide which one you like most, there is Random option which will load different one each time the homescreen shows.

The top line houses icons for the service information and below it there are three shortcuts: silent mode on/off, menu, and dial pad. Rather strange solution is that in order to (de)activate the silent mode, one has to hold its key unlike the others that must only be touched, but this is with the idea to avoid doing it accidentally. In the middle is the button for the shortcut menu and below is either big calendar or a clock - in order to switch from one to the other, the user must slide its finger from the one side to the other. The shortcut menu is activated by the key in the middle and houses nothing but four of the icons from the main menu and one to it. We see no use of it, as it is hard to guess the meaning of each button from the icons, if you don't know them.

The main menu is displayed as a grid of 3x4 icons, with the current selection pointed by horizontal and vertical lines, crossing at it. If you sweep a finger over the icons those lines will move but the problem is that once you tap on icon it will take some time (about a second) for the animation, which although well looking is rather boring once you get used to the phone. Once you actually tap, a slight vibration will indicate this has happened. This is instead of the tactile feedback you would receive from most standard hardware keyboards and can be set at one of three intensity level or can be turned off.

Once you are in the menu, a line with three buttons appears in the lowest part of the display. The left and right button will act as the soft keys on almost all other phones, while the one in the middle always leads to the shortcut menu - something we find redundant. The sub-menus are visualized as vertical list. If the fields are more than five (which can be showed at the same time) scrolling is done by vertical sweep over the display. That menus look very plain but the custom font reminds us this is not a plain phone. As other Samsungs, the menus have "memory" and will point to the selection you've lastly used.

Phonebook

Although this phone isn't targeted as "smart" one, we are rather disappointed that Samsung hasn't used its best phonebook software module, but the simple one found on most other models. It allows for up to 1000 contacts with multiple numbers but without the option to add fields different than the preset. Searching is possible only by the first name.

The Dialing screen is one of the shortcuts on the home screen. It visualizes a virtual numeric keypad with numbers only (no letters), an area where numbers are visualized, and three buttons: Clear, Add to contacts and Go to contacts. The keypad works almost as a normal flat one, but lacks any kinds of feedback which is rather strange, considering the haptic (vibration) options.

Connectivity

The Giorgio Armani-Samsung phone is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) and, unfortunately, only one frequency can be used in the USA, which means that its use will be restricted to some areas only. Like the Prada, 3G support is missing.

Unlike the Prada which only featured WAP browser, Samsung Georigio Armani disposes of a full HTML internet browser that renders the pages as on a computer. The main problem here is the slow data, which means that a heavy HTML page will take almost age to load through the EDGE, instead of through 3G, which the phone lacks. Once it happens, you can move around the page either by touching it and pointing in any of the directions, or by using the arrows. The inconvenient thing is that it doesn’t really “move” around the page but moves to the next (in the direction) link. An option allows you to fit the whole page on the screen and then zoom on selected area, similar to the iPhone, which helps you to easily navigate to the part you want to see.

Camera

Although the phone is not touted for its camera, it still comes with 3-megapixel unit with LED flash. It is activated in about 3-4 seconds, whether you start it from the shortcut button or from the icon in the main menu and uses a landscape-oriented interface. To the left of the display is a column with icons showing the current settings that you’re using to take pictures (resolution, white balance, ISO, etc), while to the right are the navigation and settings buttons. The latter button can be hid if you wish so - a function, indicated by the small arrow.

The camera biggest drawback is not the lack of autofocus but the fact that it is very slow! It needs 9 to 10 seconds pause to save a picture (at maximum quality) and prepare the interface to take another. The images produced by it are with average quality – although there size (resolution) is big, they still are typical for a phone, with artificial colors, average detail and noise all over them. As always, once the light decreases, the quality gets even worse with more noise and blurred detail due to the noise-reduction system.

Miltimedia

The music player is a module that has been copied from the U700 Ultra phone and just optimized for the touch-sensitive display navigation. It sorts the multimedia files by: Last / All / Recently played / Artists / Albums / Genres / Composers / Playlists, similar to other music players of modern phones, like the Walkman of Sony Ericsson for example. The user can create playlists, add music from the memory to it and reorder the added tracks.

We were disappointed when a track was started and the now playing interface appeared: it has nothing in common to the one on the U700 and other recent Samsungs. In order to resemble the Croix (Cross) idea, the interface has the two lines (vertical and horizontal) which cross, occupying the whole screen. The position of the horizontal towards the vertical indicates the volume level while the opposite indicates the time progress. Rewinding and controlling of the volume is achieved by moving those lines across the screen and the play/pause is where they cross – in the “Croix point”.

Conclusion

While there are some drawbacks functionality-wise, the phone still offers more than most of its owners would require. Considering the audience it is targeted to, just as the PRADA, it has decent (and better compared with the Prada) features, with major drawback being the tri-band GSM receiver, which doesn’t allow for using it all over the world. If you are on the market for such device, it is up to you which phone you would get – the PRADA or the newer Armani. The first comes with black and silver color scheme, while the Giorgio Armani is more extravagant and smaller in dimensions, which puts it a step ahead. Still, it’s the personal taste that will choose one of the two…