Samsung E840 Review

In a nutshell: The World's slimmest phone offers a lot for your money, provided that you can put up with its touch-sensitive buttons and a battery life that's shorter than average.
Best buy: *Free* with a free LCD TV or XBOX 360 from Dialaphone.

The Samsung E840 is the World's slimmest slide phone, beating the Samsung U600 by a hair's breadth at 10.6mm. Usually it's the top-of-the-range phones that set these kinds of records, but the E840 is a mid-range phone. It's very impressive how Samsung have managed to cram so much into such a tiny phone at this budget. If you wanted a U600 but couldn't afford it, then this could be the one for you.

Although it's recognisably a Samsung, the E840 deviates a bit from the usual Samsung slider look and feel. Apart from its incredible thinness, it feels solid enough, weighing in at 99g (heavier than most recent Samsungs) and has a nice smooth glassy finish. The keypad isn't the best, but it'll be fine unless you have particularly large fingers. However, it does come with love-them-or-hate-them touch-sensitive navigation buttons. Our frank advice on this is to avoid the phone unless you've already had experience of touch-sensitive buttons (e.g. in the Samsung E900 or LG Chocolate). A safe alternative which now costs about the same is the Samsung D900i.

Sill reading? OK, well apart from the touch-sensitive issue, we like the phone a lot. It's got a lot of stuff packed into its miniature bodywork. First thing that you'll notice is the huge (2.2 inch) ultra high resolution LCD display on the front. The camera is less impressive, being rated at 2 megapixels and lacking a flash - it's for snaps only, and won't replace a proper digital camera. But the music player is fully featured, playing a wide range of formats and handling playlists quite nicely too. A built-in FM radio completes the scene. There's also a good amount of memory available - 70 Mbytes - which is enough for around 15 songs - and you can buy a memory card really cheaply these days to expand the storage. Connectivity is good, with support for Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and a TV-Out connection if you want to display pictures or videos directly onto your telly. It's quadband too, so you can take it anywhere abroad and it has a useful document viewer for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

Although Samsung claim impressive an battery life, we are sceptical. You just can't fit a big battery in a phone this skinny, and the reality is that the E840 is challenged when it comes to battery life.

So, a lovely phone with plenty of features in a good looking superslim body, the E840 offers a lot for your money. Provided that you can put up with the touch-sensitive buttons and don't demand too much from the battery, this is a phone that you could really love.

news source : http://www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk/samsung-e840.htm