| Samsung D410 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 4q, 2003 |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 97 X 48 X 24 Mm |
| Weight | 116 G |
| Display |
| Type | Tfd, 256k Colors |
| Size | 176 X 220 Pixels, 8 Lines |
| | - Four Way Navigation Keys |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (64 Channels) |
| Amount | 41 + 2 Custom |
| Customization | Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 1000 X 5 Fields, 10 Contact Groups |
| Call Records | 20 Received, Dialed And Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | No |
| | - 3 Mb For Pictures
- 3 Mb For Video
- 700 Kb For Mms
- 1 Mb For Email
- 600 Kb For Java Apps
- Message Templates
- 5 X 30 Sec Voice Memo |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 8 (4+1 Slots), 32 - 40 Kbps |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | Yes |
| Usb | |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Ems, Mms, Email |
| Browser | Wap 1.2.1 |
| Games | 4 - Bubblesmile, Fun2link, Ultimate Golf, Mobilechess, |
| Colors | 3 - Metallic Silver , Mirror Gray, Indigo Blue |
| Camera | Vga, 640x480 Pixels, Video |
| | - Java Midp 2.0
- T9
- Organizer
- To Do List
- Currency Converter
- Voice Memo
- Picture Album |
| Battery |
| | Standard Battery, Li-ion 900 Mah |
| Stand-by | Up To 254 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 3 H |
|
Samsung - D410Samsung SGH-D410
We first saw Samsung's SGH-D410 slider along side of its big-brother, the SGH-D710, at the CeBIT 2004 show in Hannover, Germany. Our first impressions of it were reasonably positive, even if we only spent a few minutes with it. We were just glad to see Samsung making a more serious effort at branching out beyond their typical clamshell form factor.
Slip sliding away
The physical design of the SGH-D410 is perhaps its strongest suit. It isn't exactly light, at 116g, but it is quite pleasing to look at and to hold. The directional controller (d-pad) that is located on the top half of the slider is reasonably nice, except that the center button is dedicated to calling up the WAP browser, which is just stupid. Samsung really needs to get this idea out of their head and start using the button as a select key. The other softkeys and call control keys are joined by a 'clear' key located under the d-pad. The numeric keypad that is located on the bottom half of the slider is pretty nice. The buttons have a nice feel and they are well spaced.
On the left side of the D410, one will find a rather large volume control rocker switch. This volume control also serves double duty as an up/down scroll control when you are not actively in a phone call, which is nice. Above the volume control is the 2.5mm headphone jack, which has a hard cover over it that I found both attractive and functional. I prefer it to the common rubber plugs found on many other handsets. Below the volume control is the IR port. There is nothing of note on the right hand side of the D410.
The top of the phone is where you will find the camera barrel (on the top half) and the external antenna (on the bottom half). It is worth noting that there is no position that the camera can be rotated into that will protect its lens, as there is on some other models.
The sliding mechanism itself seems quite well done. I got no indication that it might weaken over time. It felt completely solid. The system was also easily opened with one hand. The phone is perhaps a bit big to be closed very easily with one hand, though. It should be noted that the controls and display are by default locked when you close the slider mechanism. You can unlock them by holding down the volume control for a couple of seconds, followed by holding down the left softkey for a couple of seconds. I found that a bit extreme. Either of the two buttons by itself should have been enough.
According to the Samsung website, the D410 will be available in 3 colors: metallic silver, mirror gray, and indigo blue.
Multimedia
Samsung's D410 is dominated by its large, bright display. It makes use of a 262k color TFD unit with a resolution of 176x220, and the results are pretty good. There is a slight blue tint to the display when compared to some others, but most people probably won't even notice it. It just makes the images look a bit "cooler" than I would like. But other than that, the display is very crisp and has a very bright maximum brightness setting. Still, it is not as good as the 262k unit found on the Sharp GX30 that we recently reviewed.
The camera is a bit less impressive than the display. It makes use of a standard VGA sensor, with a lens mounted in a rotating barrel at the top of the handset. This allows you to take photographs of objects in front of you or of yourself just by rotating the camera into the appropriate position. That part is good. The problem is that the camera can not sense which way it is facing, and thus requires you to manually change a setting for orientation to keep it from taking photographs that are upside-down. It should have been quite easy for Samsung to have built a switch into the rotating barrel that automatically changed the image orientation - they've done it in other handsets.
Otherwise the camera is ok. There are a number of options that the user can make use of. These include reducing the image size, adding one of 12 image frames, or using the multishot mode. The multishot mode lets you take 6, 9, or 15 photos in quick succession. But while the camera has a lot of features, it is painfully slow to use at times. Changing an option requires you to wait for a couple of seconds before the camera turns back on. In fact, the entire process of activating the camera, taking a picture, and saving it is relatively slow.
The camera's video recording functionality worked a bit better. The video quality is really quite good, but the price of that is large file sizes. I recorded a 19 second video clip at 176x160 resolution, for example, that required 480k of storage space inside the phone. There is an option to record a video clip at a lower resolution, though. This shouldn't really seem like a problem since the D410 has about 10MB or storage space, but the problem is that the memory allocation is not dynamic. The 10MB of storage is broken up into sections with dedicated usages: 3MB for videos, 600KB for photos, 1MB for MMS, etc.
The real failing in the camera is connectivity. There is no way to send a video clip via IR or email, which is a shame. Still photos also can not be sent by IR, but they can be sent via email or MMS. The sample photos you'll see later in the story were sent via email. Supposedly some versions of the D410 package come with a cable and software that allows you to pull files off of the phone. The retail package version that I received was not so equipped, though. The brochure we picked up at CeBIT does state that it has this ability, so you might want to check what is included in the package before you buy.
The SGH-D410's 64 voice polyphonic system was also a bit of a mixed bag. While there are a vast array of ringtones included (30 by my count), and the sound quality is top notch, the maximum volume level is not nearly loud enough for some situations. If you put the D410 next to Samsung's aging S300, for example, there is simply no comparison. While the S300 was almost too loud, the D410 will easily go unnoticed in your pocket if you are in a noisy situation. Part of the problem is that none of the included ringtones is obnoxious enough, "normal" enough, if you will. But in any case, you might expect the vibration alarm to make up for that. This is another problem. There is no way to have the vibration mode and ringing mode enabled at the same time. It is an either/or proposition. That's just not acceptable.
Getting around
The SGH-D410's user interface is fairly typical Samsung, with some minor changes. There are two modes for the main menu: page mode and bar mode. In page mode, you see a large image of the current selection, and then a small image at both the top and the bottom that shows what the previous and next menu items are. In bar mode, the screen is split up into 4 sections, each showing a menu item. I suppose I prefer the bar mode, just because you see more information at once, but both seem reasonable. I would have preferred an icon grid menu to both, but it's not really a big deal.
One of the changes I noticed in the D410's UI versus some older designs is that you can select a menu item by pressing right on the d-pad. You can back out to a prior menu level by pressing left on the d-pad. I like this a lot, and it helps make up for the d-pad's center button not acting as a select button. The use of the left and right softkeys is fairly consistent. Left is select, right is back - in most cases. As you navigate deeper and deeper into the menu structure, you will see a series of numbers separated by periods growing next to the right softkey. This is the sequence of keys to press to get to the current menu selection. For example, 1.4.2 means from the main menu, press the 1 key, the 4 key, and then the 2 key. This makes it a bit faster to skip to commonly used functions. In the standby mode, the 4 directions on the d-pad are assigned to shortcuts, such as activating the camera. You can not customize these shortcuts, however.
One thing that is really lacking from the user interface is themes. You can, of course, set the wallpaper used in the standby screen, but you can not impact on any other aspects of the UI. This is particularly a problem because the default color scheme uses some things that I find very counterintuitive. For example, in a list of items, the currently selected item appears grayed out. If you are looking at a list of 4 options, the selected one is easy to pick out, since it is the only different one. But when looking at a choice of two options, I always get it backwards since I can not force myself to view the grayed out option as being the selected one. It just makes no sense and is counter to what you see on other phones or even personal computers.
Samsung SGH-D410
The overriding problem with the SGH-D410 is none of these things, however. The problem is the speed. This is not to say that you can not move through the menus quickly, because you can. The problem is in the little pop-up 'windows' that Samsung uses to show that it has saved your choice. Every time you select/change a setting, the display will show a graphic that says "Saved" or "OK" or whatever. This graphic will stay on the display for a couple of seconds, and you must wait for it to go away on its own before you can do anything. You can't type ahead. You can't make it go away. You just have to wait. Any positive changes made to the UI are completely and utterly overridden by this single addition. It makes the entire phone seem slow, because it inserts artificial pauses all over the place. The system is at its worse when setting up something like an email account, with its myriad of settings. You'll easily spend half of the time waiting for the phone to let you do something.
Making/Taking calls
The SGH-D410's audio quality in a phone call is good. The sound is on par with current handsets from other manufacturers. No real surprise there. The surprise, instead, comes from the poor reception the handset has on the 1900Mhz band. I had a real problem with dropped calls and timed out GPRS connections when using the phone at home. Considering that the D410 has an external antenna, and a rather large one at that, this is very surprising. The triband D410 might work better on its other two bands, 900Mhz and 1800Mhz, but I have no way of testing that.
There is no real profile system at all in the D410. The user is limited to normal and silent modes. Silent mode is activated/deactivated by holding down the # key for a second or two. The silent mode's vibration alert works at a pretty high frequency and tended to make a strange high pitched whining noise. It's hard to explain.
Battery life seemed pretty good as long as you didn't spend too much time with the display on. Samsung's claim of up to 10 days of standby time is probably close to accurate - as long as you don't use the display and its bright backlight at all. After 5 days of sitting around on my desk, the D410 still showed a full battery icon. Samsung claims up to 4 hours of talk time are possible with the SGH-D410, but I was unable to gauge that for myself.
There are a number of keypad speed dials available, which is good since there is no voice dial/command system. There is a mute function available, and the slider mechanism can be set to be either active or inactive, meaning that it can be set to answer/end a call, if you wish.
The phone's contact management system is ok. It allows you to enter multiple numbers and an email address for use with the email client. My test unit came with no means to synchronize with a PC, though, which is a bit of a pain. Navigation through the contact list when placing a call worked well enough, though.
Connections
The SGH-D410 is reasonably well connected, in theory. The phone has an IR port, for example, but it can only be used to send/receive vCard and vCal files. You can't use it to send photos or video clips to another phone, as I mentioned before.
The D410 supports a cable connection to a PC, but as the unit I received did not have a cable and software included, I can't comment on how well it works or whether or not it will enable the handset to be used as a GPRS modem.
The GPRS system worked pretty well, as long as the phone had a decent signal. I was able to email photos to myself with relatively good speed. Setup was not too painful, either. The WAP v1.2 browser was able to navigate typical WAP sites with no real problem, too.
Send a message
Like with most things in the D410, the handset's message system is also marred by some shortcomings. In general the system works decently. There is support for up to 5 MMS profiles, 5 email accounts, 3 SMS profiles, and 5 SMS text templates. SMS messages can be sent over either a GSM or GPRS connection, too. As I mentioned before, there is 1MB of memory for MMS messages, and an equal amount for email. There is also enough space for 200 SMS messages on top of that.
The email system worked pretty well for me. I didn't test out the IMAP support, but the POP3 support worked just fine with our mail server. Creating a message is not a problem at all, and the sending and receiving of messages was pretty quick for a GPRS system.
The MMS editor was a bit simplistic for my liking. You can only create a single slide in a MMS message, for example. This is what I might have expected from a phone made 2 years ago, but not today.
The real problem with the message system lies in the text entry. The D410 has a pretty poor implementation of Tegic's T9. While it seems fast enough, there just seems to be a need to switch text entry modes far too often. Other manufacturers do it better, by far. But the idiosyncrasies were not limited to T9, either. Some things were just annoying, like not being able to hold down a key to get a number (you instead have to switch to numeric mode). Other things were just wrong, like the system defaulting to different input modes for inbound mail server and outbound mail server when configuring an email account. It really just seemed like a hodgepodge of input methods, not a single system that was designed from the ground up to work well in concert.
Apps
The SGH-D410 comes with a typical assortment of applications, including a calendar, todo list, alarm, calculator, and games. The calendar system is relatively simplistic, but does allow you to enter a note with an alarm that uses a melody of your choosing. The Todo list allows you to assign a priority level along with the date and description of a task.
The alarm program is probably the best of the included apps. You can set an alarm that will go off once, daily, or every day except Sunday or every day except Saturday and Sunday both. There is even an "autopower" mode that will allow the alarm to sound even if the phone has been turned off.
The calculator application is fairly standard and useable. I have seen better calculators, for sure, but this one works well enough. There is also a currency conversion program, if you need that kind of thing.
The Golf game that was included on my D410 was good in design, but ran too slowly to be of much fun. Like so many other parts of the D410, the game often left you waiting for a while before you could continue. That just steals the fun out of the game itself, which looks like it probably would have been quite good if not for that. One thing that was annoying in the Java based games was the select key. In the rest of the phone, the blue button in the middle of the d-pad is not used as the select key. But in the included games, it is the only select key. This is just silly, and a basic error in user interface design: no consistency. Just one more reason to not use the center button as a WAP access key.
Conclusion
When Sid and I first played with the D410 in Germany, we liked it. And when you look at the phone, it is pleasing to the eye. The display is quite nice, the lines of the phone equally so, and the slider mechanism works very well. But when you dig deeper into the D410, you find the ugly spots: the poor decisions, the delays, the missing features. When you consider that even the basic phone functions didn't work well, such as poor 1900Mhz reception, even with an external antenna, you are not left with much to recommend. And as such, I give the Samsung SGH-D410 a "Not Recommended" rating.
If you have your heart set on a slider type phone, you might want to check out the TM100 from Sharp or wait for the newly announced SL65 from Siemens. |
| Common misspellings on this brand: samsng |
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