Samsung SGH E490

Personally I’m not a big fan of the ‘open and answer’ flip or clamshell phone design. To each his own right. But I have to say, quite a few manufacturers have taken it to whole new level, with sleek and stylish designs and dual screens. Let’s not leave out the colors. Well, not all of them may be as appealing as the next but most manage to pull it off without a hitch. A good example of fashion and elegance in a flip phone is the Samsung SGH – E490.

Form Factor
Like I said before, the design of the E490 is quite elegant with a smooth metallic color finish and the cool style is only accentuated with the silver linings. It’s also rather slim and lightweight for a flip with dimensions like - 94 x 49 x 15.5 mm and it weighs 83g. On the front you’ll see a monochrome screen (128 x 32 pixel resolution) that’s just 32 x 8 mm wide, but has a choice of 7 colors in case you’d like to go with one that matches the replaceable panels you may have chosen. Yes the panels are changeable too. Just above the screen is the 1.3 megapixel camera.

On the right hand side is the Hot-Swap microSD slot for external memory and the dedicated camera key is just underneath that. On the other side are the propriety USB/Charger/Earphone socket. Why oh why couldn’t they just have another socket for the earphones? Anyways, moving along, underneath that are the volume keys that also double as the zoom keys. Flip her open and you have the clear 176 x 220 pixel, TFT screen with 65K colors. Just beneath the screen are 2 speakers that aren’t great but they aren’t so bad in speaker-phone mode.

I have to admit, I thought the keypad would pose a bit of a problem but thanks to the large keys and the 5 way nav-pad I had absolutely no issues. There are also 3 dedicated keys for the MP3 player, messaging and the browser.
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Features and Performance
The E490 is quite a well equipped mobile that has you covered for music, video, connectivity and of course the basic functions of any other mobile. The main menu is simple and like the design, very elegant with clear and large icons. It’s the sub menus that I have a bit of a beef with. Even though the fonts are really large and crystal clear, what happens is, every-time you come to an option a small drop down box pop out that shows you what options you have under that heading. Given, that makes things a bit simpler to know where options are but in case there are plenty it tends to occupy a whole lot of unnecessary space. I’m sure after awhile it’s not going to be too difficult to figure out which options are located where.

A annoying function the E490 throws at you can really get unnerving. The battery just happened to be on its last legs early this morning and having kept the alarm on, it was near my head. The darn phone kept beeping over and over again but there seemed to be no indication as to why. It’s my presumption that it’s due to the lack of battery juice. What’s disturbing though is even after I turned off all the sound notifications I could find; it still kept beeping till I shut the phone off. Needless to say I lost a bit of sleep.

The E490 doesn’t offer anything special when it comes to features. It’s pretty basic as mobiles go. What makes it appealing is how user friendly Samsung has tried to make the phone. The on screen font size when typing out a phone number can be a little surprising at first as each number pretty much takes up almost a quarter of the screen. But not only can you tone down the size, you can change the background color and the font colors as well.

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What I didn’t like about the phone is when I wanted to use a music file as a tone. I couldn’t find any music from the “Incoming call” selection for ringtones. I had to go to the memory card from the file manager and use the ‘Set as’ option for the track I wanted as the tone. But in order for the track to be used it must be copied onto the phone’s memory first. So if you don’t have space on the phone, forget about it.

The browser, although rather slow (I’ll admit it could also be due to my poor service), is decent enough. The E490 also supports EDGE so if you have a better service provider you’ll have no problem with speed. There seems to be an option for adjusting the views but I couldn’t really see any deviation from what it looked like to begin with. But no worries, it’s still easy to navigate. The pre-installed Yahoo Search option is also quite handy to have.

The E490 also comes with a few games that are quite entertaining to help pass the time. Arch Angel is a 3D, Space Invaders styled game that’s looks pretty darn good actually. There’s also a football game called Freekick (also quite good). Some of the other games are Mini Golf and Asphalt Urban GT, which refused to play for some reason. I hope that was a problem with just this one phone though. There are a couple of other Java based games as well. Though not as good as these, they are fun to play however.

Other features are pretty standard with converters for almost everything from weight to currency, a world clock in case you’re a frequent traveler, a stopwatch and timer, calculator, alarm and calendar function for storing reminders, memos and to-dos.

On to media now - although the phone does have an MP3 player and supports video playback, I wasn’t impressed with the sound quality or volume. It’s way too low for a noisy city like Mumbai. And since I couldn’t use any other earphones (Samsung propriety slot) I have to say that the output really was way too low. There aren’t any EQ presets either to make any sort of adjustments. On the plus side, the player’s interface is quite snazzy with 2 visualizations to choose from.

Another problem with the E490 is that it doesn’t play back a lot of standard formats. Even though I copied a few .mp3 music and .3gp video files that played on all other phones, they refused to play on this one for some reason. I kept getting errors like – media type not supported. Odd! Even though it’s supposed to read MP3 and AAC file formats. Having a voice recorder doesn’t really help make up for the lack of an FM radio unfortunately.
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Camera
The 1.3 megapixel camera seems to be more for fun rather than anything else. The pictures are rather dull even in bright lighting and after making a few adjustments. And using it may not seem so easy if you haven’t read the manual. So please make sure you buy a boxed piece. Options can be used using the keypad as I found out. Oddly enough the E490 has more funny frames than any other settings. Too many in fact.

Close up’s are blurry and unclear and normal shots are just plain blah. Nothing impressive.

The E490 has 22MB of built in memory and you can use microSD cards to increase your space if need be. The battery life of the E490 is just plain average. I lasted me for a little over 2 days of very low usage. A few pictures, couple of video recordings, not too many calls and messages or much of anything else either. So it’s ok. Like I said, average.

The Bottom Line
Priced at Rs. 7800/- it just ain’t worth it just for a good looking phone. It has too many kinks and oddities. Let’s not forget it doesn’t even have an FM radio and it has a problem reading normal video and music files. So what do you get for that money - a great looking phone that you can use simply to take and make calls and messages. That’s not good enough. The price is too high for just a fashion phone.

Specs

| **Samsung SGH E490
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