Life of A Phone Lover

Samsung Armani Review

I don’t really understand why mobile phone manufacturers like naming their products with glamorous names which are constantly linked to the fashion industries. Take for example, Prada and Giorgio Armani. I was speculating whether in future we'll have brand names like Nike, Calvin Klein, or Versace associated with mobile phone companies. Judging from the past, there's always a possibility of them coming up with some sensational names, perhaps a new invention called the Nokia Versace after this? Anyway, let’s skip that for the time being and get back to our topic.

Samsung Armani is a Triband/EDGE phone with most of its design and features similar with LG Prada. It includes a 3.0-megapixel camera, 60MB built-in memory, microSD with expansion slot, 2.6 inch display with touchscreen support, Bluetooth, document viewers and WiFi. I believe the target market for this phone will mostly be supporters of the "Giorgio Armani" label and maybe a number of trend followers craving for sophisticated and tasteful designs.



If you're going to purchase this phone, please take note that the following are included in the package. The standard contents of the retail box are a hard leather case, charger, data cable, memory card, a wired stereo headset, soft pouch as an alternative to the leather case and also a cleaning cloth.



Since this is a touch screen phone, it only has 2 keys on the front which is a Send key and an End key. I would say the menu function is not quite user friendly as each individual text label is not shown under the icon. It will be visible to user only if they touch the selected icon. Buyers would be advised to spent some time playing with the phone in order to be more familiar with its functions. If not, I assume you would have a hard time guessing.


This is how the menu looks like

Basically you will use the touch screen for everything except for answering and ending calls (you may also use the touch screen to do this if you want to). So what about sms-ing?


Message Menu and Creating Message

The sms function is very similar to a normal phone. So nothing much to talk about here. Personally I find that using a touchscreen to type messages is faster. But on the other hand, I hate typing sms using touchscreen whilst driving.

After reading through some reviews, although this phone comes with a 3.0mp camera, it does not have the ability to auto focus and does not come with Xenon flash. What a waste.. Image quality will definitely not be as good as Sony Ericsson's CyberShot technology or Nokia's Carl Zeiss Optics, Tessar™ lens. Therefore, no matter how many functions Samsung Armani have under their image editor, you can just forget about getting clear and sharp images from its camera.


Music Player (sorry about the blur picture)

The Music player allows you to filter tracks or videos by artist, album, genre or to play the tracks/videos you've recently listened to, or the ones that you've played the most. Other than this, you can also create your own custom playlists. Nothing special about the music player as most phones comes with this function. The only thing to be proud of with this phone is that it supports Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP which allows you to listen to music on stereo Bluetooth headphones.

Menu such as organizer, phone book, call setting and phone setting is quite the same like a normal mobile such as my N73. Nothing remarkably special about it.

The main disadvantages would be its slow memory card reading, slow interface (menu) response, no camera auto-focus, and no 3G (I was kinda shocked when I discovered this because this phone has got WiFi!!)

In short Samsung Armani is a hip phone designed specially to attract those who has a passion for fashion. With its name related to "Armani", logic would say that it's never gonna come easy on the pocket. I would rather put it in this way, they are focusing on the brand itself more than on the capabilities of the device. For me, this phone is not very worthwhile as it is valued solely on the brand name itself.

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