Samsung Star S5230 - a Review

Samsung has been steadily capturing the touch screen market by launching affordable phones with unbelievable features. The recently launched Samsung Star is one such phone which comes with features that could put some of its high end competitors to shame. The phone features a 3 inch touch screen with great multimedia capabilities. With support for all e-mail protocols and the mobile printing feature, the phone is a definite winner, at least in the emerging markets. But the phone with all the other features comes without a GPS, one of the primary components of smartphones today.

The Basics:

Design and display:
The Star is set in a sleek black body with a large touch screen taking up most of the frontal facade of the handset. The phone weighing only 92 Gms comes in chrome black color and features a 3 inch high definition TFT touch screen. Below the screen are placed the quick keys for answering or dropping calls with the menu key in the middle. Navigation is solely through the touch screen and there is no navigation wheel or pad as in the other phones.
The screen features Samsung's famed TouchWiz technology with support for widgets that makes the navigation experience even more exhilarating. The screen also comes with a full QWERTY keypad for easy test input. The phone comes with a built in accelerometer that rotates the screen automatically on changing the orientation of the handset.

Multimedia:
The 3.2 MP camera is that comes packed into the phone can capture great quality still images and record moving videos at 15 fps. The phone comes with all the standard features like autofocus and zoom. The camera can be used to shoot pictures in five different modes: Continuous, Mosaic Shot, Frame shot, Panorama shot and Smile Shot. The Smile Shot is the ability of the phone to recognize smiles and click automatically when it detects one. The accelerometer built into the phone also acts as an image stabilizer to aid in capturing great quality pictures and videos. Edit your photos on the phone, create photo albums and share them instantly with the phone's built in photo blogging feature.

The phone's music player is capable of playing music in all available formats and renders high quality sound supported by the built in DNSe sound engine. The phone also features the Shazam music service that can be used to recognize songs and download them directly via the internet.
Watching high definition video in the large screen is an exhilarating experience with the phone's built in video player.

Organizer and email:
The phone comes with all the personal management features like calendar and world time. The e mail feature includes support for both push and web protocols like POP3, SMTP and IMAP4.

Specifications:

Display:3.0 inch TFT resistive touch screen with support for 65k colors.
Dimensions:104 x 53 x 11.9 mm
Weight:92 Gms.
Camera: Main camera - 3.2 MP, 2048x1536 pixels with autofocus, digital zoom and smile recognition.
Second camera - No.
Audio:MP3/WMA/AAC, FM Stereo.
Video:H.263/H.264/MPEG4.
Messaging:SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging.
Connectivity:Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP, mini USB, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g.
Internet:EDGE, GPRS, HTML, xHTML, WAP2.0 browser.
Games:Built-in and downloadable.
Memory:15 MB internal with support for microSD up to 16GB.
Battery:Standard battery, Li-Ion 1000 mAh, 600h standby and 13h talk time.
Extras:

Gesture-lock
handwriting recognition
Shazam Find music service
Google Apps
Photo Effects
Photo blogging
Mobile printing
Podcasting