Samsung gets it nearly right with E900 mobile

Technofile: You can tell when a company is starting to get desperate for new ideas when they start to introduce "fancy" new …

Technofile: You can tell when a company is starting to get desperate for new ideas when they start to introduce "fancy" new features on a product that previously just worked. I found this when looking in more detail at Samsung's new E900 mobile phone. On the face of it, this is a luxuriously styled mobile, with a sensuous sliding action and a satisfyingly bright, glass-like TFT screen.

The user interface is helpful, easy to use and the phone itself has a number of features, the best being its 2 megapixel camera for stills and video, with digital zoom and flash.

Wireless printing using Bluetooth is supported with a PictBridge-compatible printer - you can view your recorded photos and videos directly on a TV. The MP3 player works well and it has a fulsome 80 megabytes of memory plus a memory card. Frustratingly, the E900 may be Samsung's (which could rival Nokia if it put its mind to it) best phone to date.

I say frustratingly because - like the new LG "Chocolate" phone - the E900 also has touch-sensitive keys.

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And both phones suffer from this retrograde step in mobile phone design that is gripping the industry at present. The simple fact is that a mobile cannot be treated with kids' gloves - which is what you find when trying to operate something that responds to the slightest waft of your hand. Handing it to my wife, she cooed over the E900 form, but quickly started cursing it when it repeatedly deleted one of her famously long texts to her friends, due simply to brushing the touch-sensitive keys. (On second thoughts, I quite like this feature.)

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So Internet Explorer refugees may be interested in the new version of the excellent Firefox web browser, now in version 2.0 as of this week. An integrated spell checker and an anti-"phishing" tool (which checks if the site is genuine) should sway any waverers.

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