Compare Samsung U900 Soul Contract Mobile Phone Deals

 
A Smart Camera Phone, Not A Smartphone With A Camera

I’m one of the large segment of the mobile phone using userbase that’s been suckered by smart phones. Smart phones are glitzy! They’re sexy! They’ve got bells, they’ve got whistles, they’ve got incredible lists of features! They’ll make you the envy of…

Well, honestly, they’ve got features I never use. They’re harder to use than I’d like – you have so many features competing for such a small slice of user interface real estate that you’re constantly turning on features you didn’t want by accident and more.

It used to be that carrying a cellular phone that weighed less than a brick was enough. Now, you can’t really find a phone without a camera or a music player. Looking at what I wanted in a phone, I mostly use it for calls, sometimes as a music player, and periodically as a camera – I have a dedicated CCD camera that lives in my bag anyway, because it’s got better optics.

 
 
Then I got to play with the U900. It’s a lovely slider phone – quite stylish, and still quite usable. Buttons are well placed, if a bit firm, and it’s a fully 3G phone, able to use HSDPA connections for data transfers. The menu system isn’t too complex, and it doesn’t try to be a smart phone. It’s got a contacts manager and an automatic dial list, and that’s well set up to be used without finding a gentleman with a pocket protector.

My trusty old camera has a 4 megapixel CCD; the U900 has a 5 megapixel one, and the flash is actually better than my camera’s. I miss real optics, but the sheer resolution helps make up for that. The screen is a 320 by 240 full color display, and is bright enough to see by daylight. It’s got 60 megs of memory, and can take a card (Micro SD) for storing pictures and music. There is a good enough photo editing program built into the phone – red eye elimination is easy, you can crop and resize. When I go to antique shows, this is lovely – even more so because I can upload the files directly by the 3G network, all painlessly. It’s so nice not having to load files into the computer to edit them for an eBay auction.

The U900 Soul has finally let me combine my cell phone and digital camera – it’s one less gadget for me to carry. The only nit I have to pick with it is that battery life suffers a bit, particularly if you’re using the video camera application built into it.

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