I received the Samsung F480 from Samsung almost three weeks ago now and I think I’ve been delaying this review so that I didn’t have to give the phone back. The Samsung F480 is truly an awesome mobile worthy of praise.
Features:
The F480 is a 98.4 x 55 x 11.6 mm mobile that weighs in at 100.6 g. It is a good looking phone with many people confusing it for an iPhone at first. It sports a 240 x 320 pixels pixels screen that is 2.8 inches in size. Other features include the now standard Bluetooth and USB2.0 connections.
The F480 also comes equipped with a 7.2 Mbps HSDPA modem. The mobile comes with 232 MB of internal memory which I feel is not sufficient. Especially with a 5MP camera and the brilliant media capabilities the F480 has.
The F480 is a touchscreen phone, but it does not work with a stylus. It is “friction” based touch which means you need to clean your hands before working with this too much otherwise there could be a slight grease build up on the screen. This also means that the smaller the button, the harder it is to press.
The Samsung F480 features a custom “widget” desktop. Basically, you can drag certain widgets from a side panel onto the desktop to use it. So for example, when you want to put the phone on silent, you drag the speaker icon onto the desktop, open up the speaker icon, set the profile to silent and drag the menu back onto the side panel to hide it.
The Samsung F480 has a 5 MP camera that supports resolutions up to 2592X1944 pixels. The camera has a host of features such as Face Recognition and Smile Recognition. This is very useful especially when you trying to get 4 or 5 people to smile in a photo, you simply hold in the the camera focus button and as soon as the camera has identified where all the faces are, it waits for everyone to smile and then takes the photo.
Its a bit difficult getting it right in the beginning as things such as poor lightning can affect it. The F480 also comes with built in Shozu support, this seems to be a new standard among cellphones. As you take a photo you can share it immediately via Shozu and thanks to the 7.2 Mbps modem, the photo uploads at lightning speeds.
The F480 includes a FM Radio with RDS support and MP3/AAC/AAC+ support. The F480 also supports H.264/H.263/MPEG4 support. The sound quality is very good. The sound quality for the hands-free speaker mode was perfect.
I think my only gripe with the F480 is that in bright sunlight it is quite difficult to see whats happening on the screen. The photos tend to blur quite badly at night but this is a general observation across most cellphone models.
Applications:
Since the F480 supports JAVA MIDP 2.0 applications and so I installed Opera Mini Browser. Naturally there were no problems installing it and it ran very smoothly and loaded up exceptionally quick.
I was unfortunately upset with Opera since they on screen buttons you use for typing are exceptionally small and its difficult to hit the correct button every time. I ended up using the built-in Browser rather than Opera for that exact reason.
Next I installed MXiT which installed perfectly. The battery life when using MXiT wasn’t bad at all and I got through the whole day logged into MXiT without any connections problems thanks for MXiT’s latest version.
Unfortunately Nimbuzz does not support the F480 natively and as such I did not install it. I also installed the Gmail Java applet which worked perfectly.
Battery Life:
Absolutely brilliant. I fully charged the cellphone when I got home and run the phone for almost 4 days before needing to charge it. Even then, I only charged it because I was expecting a long, important phone call.
The Samsung F480 charges while connected to a PC via its USB cable. This is especially useful when making use of the F480 as a modem. I have no higher praise for the battery life on this phone. They say it should give you 3 hours talk-time, I disagree and would put that figure closer to 4 hours.
Conclusion:
This is a stunning phone. Great features, great battery life and very stylish! I would suggest this phone for anyone. It caters for people who want music on the go, Emails on the go, Movies on the go and also a good cellphone. Samsung have a true beauty in the F480!
