Samsung S5600

Samsung have quite wisely decided to make the complacent LG Cookie smile go away. And they have released not one, but two devices to compete with it. The Samsung S5600 is one of them and luckily we have the opportunity to play with it for a while with the Samsung S5230 soon to follow.

Attacking the midrange market the Samsung S5600 is a member of the new affordable touchscreen gang. Quite reminiscent of the HTC Touch with its size, shape and display, the Samsung S5600 is actually not a smartphone. It run on the proprietary Samsung TouchWiz user interface, and while it's not a high-end phone, it still has some decent equipment.

General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps Form factor: Touchscreen bar, no keypad Dimensions: 102.8 x 54.8 x 12.9 mm Display: 2.8-inch TFT, QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels) Memory: 80MB, Non-hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB) Camera: 3 megapixel fixed focus camera with LED flash and smile detection Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS Misc: Accelerometer sensor, FM radio with RDS, Find Music recognition service, DNSe, gesture lock Battery: 1000 mAh battery

Samsung S5600 was first spotted at MWC 2009, but no details were released by that time. In fact, it was so conspicuously displayed, that we even missed including it in our detailed coverage of the event.

The Samsung S5600 is not a ground-breaking device and probably won't create much hype, but still it's one of those devices that sell… and these devices sell in quite some volumes.

Join us on the next page for a walkthrough of the Samsung S5600 exterior and ergonomics. Just bear in mind to take it easy on us and the S5600 - it's still a rather early pre-production unit and changes are possible (and highly likely) at all hardware and software levels.

Design and construction The display of the Samsung S5600 is enclosed by a black plastic frame. Above the display there is an ambient light sensor and the earpiece grill. There is no videocall camera, but the S5600 is still capable of making video calls.

There's nothing special about the glossy black frame except perhaps the fact that it's pretty prone to attracting fingerprints.

There is no Back key among the three hardware buttons at the bottom. Instead, the S5600 is tuned to use the left direction of the D-pad for that purpose.

The center of the D-pad is quite strangely reminiscent of certain optical trackpads that we've seen Samsung use on other phones, but the manufacturer has not announced anything about this and it didn't seem to work as a trackpad on our unit.

The Samsung S5600 is modestly styled with the only exception being the brushed metal plate, which hosts the hardware keys.

On the left side of the Samsung S5600 there is a simple volume rocker and a lanyard eyelet. The right-hand side is just as simple with only two keys available here - the camera key and the HOLD key, which is used to lock and unlock the touchscreen.

The camera key can be set to either start the camera or a shortcuts tab.

At the top of the Samsung S5600 is a protective cap hiding the standard miscroUSB port that's used for connecting the charger, data cable and headset. We're really glad to see Samsung steadily incorporating the microUSB port on many of its latest phones - much like Nokia. The other manufacturers should follow suit.

The back panel of the Samsung S5600 is quite modest - as is the whole phone. However it's made of some really nice plastic, which provides some extra finger grip and doesn't accumulate fingerprint smudges at all.

As you can see on the images, the 3 megapixel camera is equipped with a LED flash - quite unlike the slimmer LG Cookie. Unfortunately, there's still no auto focus. The camera our early pre-production unit was not operational, so unfortunately, we won't be posting sample camera images.

However Samsung are promising that the device should come with smile detection plus that we found a GPS receiver on board so getotagging is pretty much sealed as a camera feature as well.

While the positive reaction of the LG Cookie styling and ergonomics seem more immediate, the Samsung S5600 is a great handset too. While it doesn't impress on first sight, it has an ability to slowly grow on you, and by the end of the day, it totally owns you.

TouchWiz user interface The Samsung S5600 comes with the latest implementation of the TouchWiz user interface much like the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH and the BeatDJ. Lively, colorful and pleasantly thumbable - the latest reincarnation of the TouchWiz UI has inherited all the virtues of its predecessors and adds some interesting new stuff.

In case you need a refresh, the widgets are basically convenient mini-applications for customizing your home screen. Some of the widgets are more practical such as the calendar or the world clock, even the image gallery or the mp3/radio player, while others are just pointless and funny.

Traditionally, all the widgets are stored on a bar on the left which you can toggle by using the small arrow in the lower left corner. You can pick which widgets to display by simply dragging them onto the display and placing them where you want. If you want to remove any of them, all you need to do is drag them back to the bar.

Leaving some different icon graphics aside the S5600 unit we had didn't differ much from what we've already seen in other Samsung devices.

Samsung promised a new touchscreen feature on that mobile called Gesture Lock. It should enable users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item or an application just by drawing an alphabet letter on the unlock screen. Users should be able assign various actions to any of the alphabet letters from A to Z. Unfortunately, that feature was not present on our early pre-production unit.

You can still check out some interface screenshots to get an idea of the rest of phone features - messaging, applications and organizer.

Music player The music player of the Samsung S5600 hasn't been greatly altered from the M8800 Pixon. Some additional visual effects have been added but that's as far as the changes go.

It allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

The music player also has a dedicated widget, allowing quick access to the full version of the application by only a single tap. You can also start, stop and alternate tracks straight from the home screen if you prefer.

Last, but certainly not least, the player is nicely touch-optimized including fast forward and rewind, just like the Pixon. This adds up to an excellent music application that can fully replace your portable MP3 player.

Nice finger-optimized galleries are available Quite expectedly, the Samsung S5600 has two different picture galleries. Accessed from different parts of the menu, they are optimized for touch operation and are decently user-friendly. The first is an inherent part of the file manager and accessing it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. The sweeping is really responsive and fluid and the capacitive screen might be the reason for this and not some software improvement.

The alternative to the picture gallery is PhotoBrowser. It has a dedicated icon in the main menu and is the quickest way to access you images. Sorting options were unavailable due to the very early software of our test unit.

The galleries also have slideshows and a nice accelerometer-based feature. It lets you browse pictures in fullscreen landscape mode by simply tilting your phone on its side (plus, of course, you get automatic rotation of the photos by changing the device orientation).

GPS-equipped, indeed When we received the test S5600 unit, we were surprized to find out that the handset is actually equipped with a GPS receiver. Samsung did not announce that at the official launch of the device.

S5600 is able to use the built-in GPS chip for geotagging and some Java applications, much along the lines of Samsung Pixon. There is no navigation software supplied with our test handset, but we guess at least Google Maps will be on board. Samsung may even throw in their dedicated satnav software at some extra cost.