It should be no surprise that style and design have clearly been given plenty of thought when we tell you that Samsung has teamed-up with Bang & Olufsen for this, the F400 phone.
Admittedly B&O is on board only to provide ‘ICEpower' audio technology but nevertheless this handset is one you would be proud to plonk on the table in the pub. It's a dual slider design; push the black fascia up to reveal the silver keys or push down to reveal the commuter-unfriendly B&O speakers.
Your main port of call will be the scroll wheel that also has directional keys, while four more controls are on the side of the device. Stick to these and you'll find your way around this handset pretty quickly.
Add card for memory
There's only a tiddly 20MB of internal memory with Samsung preferring the microSD card route and providing an 8GB card. Key file formats MP3, AAC and WMA are supported, though you won't be able to play WAV files, while for video you can watch both MPEG4 and WMV formats on a decent-sized, detailed screen for a handset this size.
Elsewhere, there's support for 3G, a 3-megapixel camera and a dedicated headphone socket.
Sonically this Samsung is impressive. It doesn't quite have the subtlety and detail of the iPhone 3G, but it's an undeniably pleasant, perfectly listenable experience, which we didn't think would be the case when we first thought about music mobiles.
Even the speaker is better than we expected; but we'd stick to earphones. Good work Samsung and B&O.
Samsung F400 review
Good quality sound makes this a fine proposition Tested at £0.00
What Hi-Fi? Verdict
Good quality sound makes this a fine proposition
Pros
- +
Clever dual slider
- +
open, airy sound
- +
decent specs and usability.
Cons
- -
SD card required
- -
sound could be more detailed.
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