Samsung are definitely capable of placing some extraordinary goods on the market, as they have proven again lately with the Samsung K5 MP3 player, fully operational by touch screen, and the Samsung i7 digital camera with its swivel screen. Also the announcements they made at the 3GSM in Barcelona caused a stir within the mobile telephone market. I have received a Samsung SGH-X830 sample for testing; a mobile phone aiming entirely at the MP3 player lovers! Extremely small, 1GB internal memory and a jog dial are just a few features on the Samsung X830. An additional and very special characteristic of the Samsung SGH-X830 is the arrangement of the buttons; however, I will come to tell you that later. No matter how small the Samsung X830 is, Samsung managed to equip it with a digital camera containing a resolution of 1.3 Megapixels. You can read how well the Samsung X830 has performed in practise in the Samsung SGH-X830 review.
Samsung SGH-X830 - Design
The Samsung X830's design is certainly very special. When taking the mobile phone in your hands for the first time, you'd think it was an MP3 player. The front of the telephone contains a jog dial for scrolling through the menu and in the centre a confirmation button is placed. To the left side of the telephone, you'll find the connection for the head set and some silver coloured volume buttons. The right side of the telephone contains the buttons with which you can operate the inbuilt digital camera. The Samsung X830 has a so-called swivel design; you have to swivel it to open it. It is very beautiful but I do get the feeling that the swivel is placed on the wrong side of the telephone. It simply doesn't feel right to open it the way it opens now.
Samsung X830 - Design
Samsung SGH-X830 - Menu
The menu is arranged differently than normally because of the telephone's extremely small size. In stead of three icons side by side, Samsung chose to put two icons side by side on the Samsung X830. Scrolling through the menu is very easy and quick once you're used to the jog dial. In the beginning you'd pass a setting or you'd touch the jog dial accidentally when trying to confirm a setting so you'd confirm the wrong one, but practice makes perfect! The menu is equipped with comprehensible icons, together with a short clear explanation which ensures that even someone using the telephone for the first time, will find his way through the menu effortlessly.
Samsung X830 - Menu
Samsung SGH-X830 - Camera
The Samsung X830 is equipped with a 1.3 Megapixel digital camera. The camera's performance is reasonably okay. It is not the best camera in the world but certainly not the worst either. The colour reproduction is bright and lively. There is a small mirror on the back that lets you take self-portraits. It's a matter of trying to find the easiest way of holding the camera when taking pictures. Your fingers might cover the small lens all to easily, or just holding it with your finger tips makes the camera move and create blurred pictures for your grip is not too steady. You can also use the camera to record videos. A flash light however is lacking on the Samsung X830, which is a pity.
Samsung X830 - Camera
Samsung SGH-X830 - Interval of release
When starting up the camera, one may hope the subject one wants to capture is not too fast or it will have disappeared before the camera is actually turned on. Once the camera is ready to shoot and when you press the release button it still takes some seconds before the actual picture is taken. Unfortunately the Samsung X830's camera is not the only one with a slow start-up time and a shutter release lag. Even on equipment that is twice as expensive you will encounter these intervals. The technology simply isn't that developed yet to build in super fast image processors and buffers in cameras this size. The first digital cameras also suffered from interval of release but later on technology improved and nowadays capturing pictures have been made possible with hardly any interval.
Samsung X830 - Interval of release
Samsung SGH X830 - Camera settings
The camera of the Samsung SGH-X830 offers nice possibilities to adjust settings to your own preference and to improve pictures. It is possible to adjust the resolution as well as the ISO values and the white balance. The Samsung offers adjusting ISO sensitivity because of lacking a flash. This is very convenient because the light sensitivity gets higher, which improves taking pictures under dim light circumstances and trying to capture moving subjects (the shutter speed improves because of the higher light sensitivity). One disadvantage is that increasing ISO level, also increases digital noise
Samsung X830 - Camera settings
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Samsung X830 - Transfer pictures
If you possess a Samsung SGH-X830, you have the possibility to make pictures a lot more interesting by using frames and effects. You can add all kinds of nice things to people, like glasses or put them in an Eskimo suit. But you can also place a nice frame around them. There is also the possibility of taking pictures in Black & White or in Sepia. After editing your pictures you can send them to other telephones via MMS or Bluetooth. All in all the Samsung X830 offers really nice functions to make the camera function of the Samsung X830 a lot more interesting.
Samsung X830 - Editing pictures
Samsung SGH-X830 - Memory
The Samsung X830 has an internal memory of one Gigabyte. Not many telephones have been equipped with such a large internal memory so far. Of course this large capacity is meant for the consumer who is planning to use the MP3 function of the telephone to the full extent. Personally I regret the fact that the Samsung X830 doesn't offer the possibility to enhance the memory capacity by means of a microSD or a flash memory card. These cards are not too expensive nowadays, but there is still hope that Samsung will offer this possibility in the successor of the Samsung X830. The MP3 enthusiast will be able to keep a large part of his music collection on the Samsung X830. And of course your entire photo collection will fit on the Samsung X830's internal memory.
Samsung X830 - Memory
Samsung SGH-X830 - MP3 Player
Naturally the Samsung X830 has been equipped with an MP3 Player. Samsung definitely planned to emphasize on the MP3 player. And they did a great job. Because when the Samsung SGH-X830 is closed it doesn't look like a mobile phone at all. Nowadays you see more 'music phones' anyway, for example the W-editions (walkman editions) that Sony Ericsson put in the market. The MP3 player can also be used when the Samsung X830 is still closed. Just keep pressing the jog dial a bit longer than usually and the MP3 player will start up. The sound quality of the delivered head set is fine. The sound quality of the telephone's loud speaker is considerably poorer, but the telephone is extremely small and obviously Samsung had no more room to spare.
Samsung X830 - MP3 Player
Samsung X830 - Speech quality
Samsung SGH-X830 - Speech quality
The Samsung X830 definitely scores some points for speech quality. The voices sound good and the conversations come across clearly. The reception of the telephone is fine. Unfortunately I cannot compare the reception with other telephones at this moment because my provider has placed some extra antennas which have improved the reception of every telephone. When the head set is connected it also functions as hands free set. You can leave the telephone in your pocket and answer the call through the button on the cable of the head set. Also then the speech quality is of high quality.
It seems appropriate that I am writing about Samsung’s SGH-X830 just as the chat about Apple’s newly announced music playing iPhone reaches fever pitch. This phone is a combination of music player and Tri-band phone that is designed like no other combination of these two features I have ever seen.
The Samsung SGH-X830 looks more like a portable music player than a phone – it is tall, thin and undersized for a mobile – the dimensions are 84 x 30 x 19.9mm. It weighs 72g, which is less than any mobile I can remember seeing and supports MP3, ACC, ACC+, e-AAC+, WMA file formats.
My review sample came from O2 and has stunning white and silver casing. It is also available in pink and black. I will refrain from raging against those colours here, but read my latest editorial for a whinge.
The front fascia comprises a tall, thin screen – 19mm wide, 32mm tall and 128 x 220 pixels wide - and a wheel for navigation. This is all very music player like, and when you press and hold the navigation wheel’s central select button the music player springs into action and the display activates in wide format to show you what’s playing.
The navigation wheel’s centre button will now pause and resume playback, while pressing the wheel at the top opens the playlist, left and right skip back and forwards between tracks, and pressing the wheel at the bottom opens the music player controls and options. From here you can edit playlists, send files via Bluetooth, set a tune as a ringtone and configure the shuffle and repeat settings. Two buttons on the top edge of the handset let you control music volume.
When a call comes in the music player stops. If you take the call, at its end you can resume playback either by ending the call by moving from phone mode back into music player mode, in which case it resumes automatically, or by ending the call by pressing the ‘End Call’ button and then tapping a softmenu button to resume music playback.
So where is the End Call button and what is this ‘phone mode’ and ‘music player mode’? The answer is all in the swivel. The Samsung SGH-X830 is made in two sections, which pivot around the central select button in the navigation wheel. The pivoting action is spring loaded and feels very slick, though it only works in one direction and you’ll need to practice a bit to get the knack just right. Open the phone up and a two column numberpad is revealed.
This houses Call and End buttons, two softmenu buttons and a combined cancel and camera launch button. The navigation wheel turns into a scroll-or-click navigation button while its central select button becomes a Web browser shortcut. You can lock these keys with the only other side mounted button, marked ‘Hold’.
I found the two-column number pad easy to get used to, though if you are a frequent texter the very different alpha-key layout may prove quite painful at first.
Getting tunes onto the phone is achieved by download from the Web, Bluetooth transfer or from a PC either by synchronising with Windows Media Player or using Samsung’s PC Studio software. This is provided on a CD and accompanied by the necessary connection cable – USB at the PC end, proprietary at the Samsung SGH-X830 end.
Samsung SGH-X830 (1 GB) Cell Phone
It may have come out of the Samsung factory with a very dull name - the Samsung SGH-X830 - but this is probably one of the most interesting phones that we've seen this year.
It's a very distinctive handset to look at, measuring just 84x30x20mm and coming in at 72 grams. Then there's the Samsung X830's unusual 128x220 pixel display and a distinctive circular control pad (more of which later).
It's a rotator phone - the Samsung X830 has a narrow numeric keypad hidden behind it's narrow fascia, so it's much more conventional than the Nokia 7380. It also comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera and Bluetooth, and of course there's a multimedia player capable of playing MP3, AAC and WMA media formats. The SGH-X830 comes in a variety of colours - black, white, orange and pink. The pink version will be the first in many markets.
Internal memory is a huge 1Gb although there's no expansion slot, however 1Gb is probably enough for almost everyone. The Samsung X830 has a USB 2.0 connection, so this means that data can be transferred quickly enough to make it viable to transfer large amounts of data. Samsung say that up to 330 tracks (at 3Mb per file), although in our experience MP3 tracks are about 4Mb each and it's best to allow 64Mb per album, but even with our figures the Samsung X830 will hold 250 tracks or 15 albums.
The Samsung SGH-X830 has EDGE data support but as you'd expect it's just too tiny a phone for 3G or WiFi. There are all the usual features you'd expect to find too, such as PC synchronisation, Java and some PIM tools.
Let's look a little more deeply at that circular control pad - at first glance, it appears to be a rotator control (as with the iPod), but in fact it actually seems to be a conventional selector pad. The screenshots in Samsung's publicity photos indicate that the SGH-X830 is pretty conventional here, using screen prompts to guide the user to the relevant selector pad functions.
It does appear that Samsung have a winner with the SGH-X830. Although we've seen similar elements to the X830 in other handsets, this is the first time we've seen a such a stylish, compact and powerful multimedia device with all of these features.
Although it does look a little like the iPod, it really isn't quite the same as the long-rumoured "Apple iPhone", although Apple are probably kicking themselves now that the iPhone has taken so long to develop.
One last note about names - although this is officially the Samsung SGH-X830 device, the pink version of this handset will be sold in some markets as the "Samsung Blush" which is a much more memorable name and probably a smart move - after all, no-one tends to call the LG KG800 anything other than the "Chocolate".
Sources say that the Samsung X830 should be available from October 2006 in certain markets.
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