Someone at Samsung must be really fond of the Soul design and, honestly, we can see why. How we feel about it is not the point though. The Soul looks are spilling down the company portfolio, like it or not. The latest incarnation - Samsung S7330 - packs in stylish exterior, well-rounded feature set and a moderate price tag. And what sounds like a good recipe already is spiced up by the yet exotic touchpad. No news so far, but knowing what to expect can actually turn hard on the S7330. Users will feel entitled to more than passable performance, so let's see if it delivers.

Design

The S7330’s design reminds us of the Soul, but it lacks style and class, which in the high-end model are achieved by the use of quality material. Although it looks metal, only the battery lid is made of that material and the rest is plastic. Nevertheless, the phone is quite massive and heavy.

The main display has a QVGA resolution and supports up to 16 million colors. Below it there is a small touch-sensitive display, used for navigation. In Soul, it was called MagicalTouch, but here, the manufacturer has decided to get rid of the funny name and keep the annoying separation of the soft buttons and the SEND, END keys. That leads to the frustrating “touch here, press there”.

The lower part of the slider houses the keyboard accompanied by the Clear button and two shortcuts. They provide access to a menu with all organizer functions and activating the video call.

On the right side, you will find the camera shutter and the microSD slot, and on the opposite you’ll see the volume rocker and the charger connector. We think that it’s time for Samsung to join the microUSB party.

Display

Samsung S7330 packs a 2.2" 262K-color display of QVGA resolution. While this sounds pretty much standard for the company there is a significant upgrade here. Sunlight legibility is obviously improved, making the phone comfortable to operate even on the brightest of days. Other than that, the display also has adjustable brightness levels and very good picture quality. Contrast is crisp as usual and the image can hardly be accused of lacking vibrancy.

Keypad

The keypad of Samsung S7330 left us with mixed feelings. The keys that are revealed, once you slide the phone open, might seem large enough, but the combination of wide columns and narrow rows isn't the best. Compared to the U900 Soul, there are now etched borders between keys but that's more of a visual thing than an actual boost to tactility. The metallic ridges that went from side to side on the Soul keypad are now demoted to useless design accents. The top row of keys enjoys sufficient headroom and the Phonebook key, C key and Organizer shortcut are easy to reach and use.

The bottom row however is kind of sunk beneath the ornamental frame of the keypad bed and thus hard to access. Pressing a key is marked by a distinct click and that's a point in favor of the flatbed keypad. The backlighting is strong and even.

Telephony

Making calls with Samsung S7330 Soul is generally trouble-free. Voice quality is good enough on both ends of the line and we had no trouble with the handset at all.

Usual Samsung, the S7330 has a number of dialing animations to choose from - most of them rather childish but still amuzing. In this particular case the options are: Quill pen, Sticky note, two named "Normal", Living world and Theme. The last two vary a little according to the currently selected theme or your location.

The Smart dialing feature (called Search as spelling by Samsung) can assist dialing by looking up automatically once you start dialing. When you dial in some digits, the handset fetches not only the contacts who have phone numbers containing those, but also contacts whose names match the keypad input (much like T9 but for dialing). Effectively, that means that you may never need to dig in your contacts list to find a contact to dial.

We did our traditional speakerphone test with the Samsung S7330 to complete the telephony-related part of the review. Here is how it ranks along some of the other handsets we've measured recently. It pulls off a very good level, ranking well in the top half of the table.

Interface

There’s nothing surprising here, especially after we’ve become familiar with the Soul line and most models of the manufacturer. Only small additions to the touch sensitive pad are present. You are now able to store your own themes and even select ones with color “arrows” (figuratively speaking; if we look at it as a D-pad).Unfortunately, you won’t be able to create such a colorful theme and will have to be satisfied with the monochrome ones. Pressing the central part of the pad when at the homescreen now opens a shortcut menu with 12 positions, which can lead to a group of options from the main menu (e.g. settings) and/or to features one step below them (e.g. display settings).

The phonebook has the popular option to search for number matches upon digit input. This could be done in the names as well, but you have to select the first position of the options. Unfortunately, there’s no second name filter. Nevertheless, all organizer functions such as alarms, calendar, notes, and calculator are present.

Since S7330 is a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) GSM, it can be used worldwide. Unfortunately, it supports only the Asian and European 3G frequencies with maximum speeds of up to 3.6 Mbit/s. We are very much disappointed seeing a WAP browser, considering the fact that a cheap model like L770 is equipped with a full HTML one, and it gets very good results. It still loads heavy pages but the navigation is sluggish due to the lack of pan view.

Music

Samsung S7330 has the typical feature phone music player with nice looks and decent functionality. The list of exciting goodies isn't too long but we are happy with it as it is. The Music player application allows filtering tracks by author, album, genre and composers. You can also choose to play either the tracks you've recently listened to, or the ones that you've played the most. Custom playlists can be created too.

As with the U900, the S7330 music player has no equalizer presets, but sound effects instead. The difference is that the sound effects also include wide and surround options in addition to the six available presets. There are also three types of visualization and you can enable fading out on stop if you like.

The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background. It can then be controlled with the touchpad straight on your stand-by screen. Pressing the End key closes the application.

FM radio

Samsung S7330 also comes complete with an FM radio, which is doing quite well in terms of user interface. It has the self-tune option to store all stations of clear reception at the moment. There is also RDS that can be switched on and off depending on your taste.

The video player is one of the phone features that makes best use of the touchpad navigation. All the controls are always at hand with no need of irritating text over your video. Controlling the video player with the touchpad covers all essential features, including fast forwarding and rewinding, and these are easily accessed without going through menus. In addition, you can enjoy the videos fullscreen.

Camera

Samsung S7330 carries a 3 megapixel camera with a maximum image resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. While not a top-of-the-line cameraphone, the S7330 performed rather well in the photography field.

The camera interface very much resembles that of the good old Samsung G800. The four shortcuts that are assigned to the touch pad do help here but the result is still not the most user friendly. However, the available settings are quite a lot so we are willing to accept the somewhat complicated menu.

Some of the more important settings are picture size, shooting mode (single shot, multi-shot, mosaic, and frame), effects (black and white, sepia, negative etc.) and 3 white balance presets. The additional camera settings include contrast, saturation, sharpness, exposure metering, picture quality and auto focus settings. Exposure metering is also configurable and auto focus can be switched off if necessary.

The picture quality of Samsung S7330 is rather good. The image processing algorithm is decent though noise reduction is a bit too aggressive and eradicates fine detail. On some of the pictures the contrast isn't great either but neither of those is too bad. On the other hand, the low noise levels and the precise colors are welcome benefits.

As far as video recoding is concerned, Samsung S7330 totally disappointed us. The highest resolution available is QCIF and this is only good for MMS. Anyway, miracles were not to be expected, as even the U900 Soul only managed QVGA video.

Conclusion

That's that on the down-market Soul, which does have the good and the bad of the original. The S7330 is in a lower price bracket than the U900 Soul but packs the same UI goodies, which is an achievement. However the low-key exterior shows its modest roots. Samsung S7330 is trimmed down in terms of imaging, but the trade-off is quad-band network support. The touchpad is the S7330 defining feature, but it just isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Anyway, we might as well be too picky here and the reason probably is the high bar set by the Soul. The S7330 was only very recently released and price has nowhere to go but down. And that may be the right push for Samsung S7330 to start climbing that lower league it's playing in.