Samsung GT-E2550 2" 87.7g Black - mobile phones (Single SIM, Alarm clock, Calculator, Calendar, Converter, Countdown timer, Stopwatch, To-do list, Polyphonic, 128 x 160 pixels, 262144 colours, Negative film, Sepia)

Product Information

We'd advise those interested in the Monte to glance over at its stablemate, the Genio Slide. It's got a touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, which alleviates at least some of the control issues we have. Okay, we’re coming off a bit too negative – the S5620 Monte isn’t the most attractive Samsung touchphone but it beats the S5230 Star. It’s just that the orange accents made the phone much sharper. Indeed, this is the final nail for the Monte. It's not the worst phone in the world, but there are much better phones available, even from the same manufacturer.

In fact, it's the camera app that makes us think all the other touch problems aren't the hardware's fault, because here we never once hit a wrong button. Despite its low-end billing the Samsung Monte offers high-end features such as Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA, yet these are offset by an average camera and a limited accelerometer (only functions for video and web). The new TouchWiz 2.0 Plus interface offers a fresh set of customisation options for the three different scrollable homescreens, with the widgets now appearing along the bottom of the display rather than the left hand side. With a responsive screen and lots of social media options onboard, the Monte is worth considering as a cheap smartphone alternative. The music player, on the other hand, is surprisingly good and makes it very easy to browse through large libraries of tunes. Sound quality from the phone is also highly impressive and for once, the bundled in-ear headphones are actually good as they produce deep and rich bass tones and sparkling higher frequencies for cymbals and hi-hats. There’s also an FM tuner onboard so you can switch to the radio if you get bored of your own selection of MP3s. You’ll be asked to confirm this a couple of times, so using the same buttons select ‘yes’ until the process begins. The camera is surprisingly good for a modest 3.2-megapixel affair. The key to this is a fast shutter speed. There's no lag, and therefore no motion blur, which many camera phones suffer from. The impressively sharp images from the Sports mode really demonstrate the good job Samsung has done here.

The preview was written before the Samsung Bada OS came about but now that we’ve played with it too, we can do a better comparison. The Monte is a feature phone and Bada is a smart platform but in the end they both share the TouchWiz DNA. What that means is that the interface of both is pretty similarly – at least graphically. When it comes down to it, we just can't recommend the Monte. It gets the basic functions right, so we commend it for that, but it's so frustrating to use.

The Monte Slider has just 13MB of internal memory but, with a microSD slot nestled under its battery cover, it has the potential to take on the role of portable MP3 player. A couple of serious issues stop this prospect from being attractive though. With your phone switched off, you now have to boot it into the recovery menu, which means switching it on with a specific button combination. The keys are flat, almost level with the display and not very big, but they’re comfortable enough to use. The mic pinhole is located further down below the keys. Finally, if your Samsung phone has a separate physical home button beneath the display, then you should press volume up, home and power all at the same time until you feel a vibration. Once you do, release the power button but keep the other buttons pressed, then when you feel a second vibration you can release the remaining buttons. The exact combination will depend on which Samsung phone you have, but with most of Samsung’s more recent phones – and specifically any Samsung phone that only has volume buttons and a side button – you should press volume up and the side button until you feel a vibration and see the Samsung logo, then release them.Delve into the Settings menu, and you'll find the ability to alter the quality of shots, the few effects that are loaded, and the exposure metering ('Centre-weighted' by default, with 'Spot' and 'Matrix' available).

USB connectivity is over a micro USB port and offers you three choices when connected to a computer. Yes I would recommend this ph one, but have not rated it Excellent because, starting my first job of work in 1947, I was told that you never do a perfect job, as it dose not leave room for improvement! Cheers. Lozza-B Read full review And although the phone’s camera is a tad basic, it takes reasonably good snaps. It has a bog standard 3.2-megapixel resolution and doesn’t have an LED flash, but Samsung’s camera software is better than most and includes some neat features. For example, there’s a face detection mode as well as ‘smile shot’ where it’ll wait for the person in the frame to smile before taking the snap. You can also geotag photos thanks to the onboard GPS chip. Outdoor shots look reasonably good as colours are nice and vivid, but photos captured indoors under low light tend to come out quite grainy. The phone has a front-facing camera for video-calling on 3G networks, too. The display is 3 inches in diagonal, which puts it on par with the competition in this price segment, and the resolution is 240 x 400 (WVGA) – pretty standard but on the low-end for this screen size. Fingerprints are another unfortunate effect of the glossy plastic. Every finger to have touched the S5620 Monte is clearly and horribly visible.Also, some Samsung devices require you to either plug your phone into a computer via the USB port or connect USB headphones before these button combinations will work. 3. Enter your Google account details The Monte's 3G connection tended to be nice and fast, though browsing speed over Wi-Fi connectivity was hampered by the sluggish software.

In the vast majority of cases one of these methods will work, however a few phones for whatever reason use volume down rather than volume up, so if it’s not working, try that button instead. On the recovery menu, you should see an option that reads either ‘Wipe data/factory rest’ or ‘Delete all user data.’ Navigate to this using the volume buttons, then press the power button to select this option. We had no problems with the Monte’s call quality as both the mic and earpiece performed admirably and battery life wasn’t too bad either for a feature phone. We were able to get around two and a half days out of it, although this does drop significantly when you make heavy use of the GPS chip.This process may take up to a few minutes, but once finished, the words ‘Data wipe complete’ will appear on your phone, and you can then press the power button to select ‘Reboot device.’ For the impatient readers, here’s a rundown of the Samsung S5620 specs – the good and bad of it. Key features You can choose 'Media player' for easily getting images into a photo library application, 'Samsung Kies' for connecting to Samsung's desktop client, or 'Mass storage' to get the microSD to appear as an external drive on the computer. Affordable touch phones are all over the place so the Samsung S5620 Monte will have to win the old fashioned way – by giving more and better features. Done deal: with full-suit connectivity, the Monte aims to deliver great touch experience and social networking features plus some distinguishable styling.