Camera Phones Plaza

Nokia E50 is the latest model of the Nokia E-series, which is the business-oriented line of the biggest mobile phones manufacturer.

Unlike the E61 and E70, the E50 has neither a QWERTY keyboard, nor 16 million color display, but it’s the slimmest smartphone produced by Nokia up to now with its 15.5 mm thickness and even being 11 mm thick at the keypad, which is the reason for the good weight distribution so that the phone feels solid in the hand.

phoneArena reviewed this phone and here are their impressions: Design-wise the phone is relatively narrow and thus resembles the legendary 6310 which was the best business phone back then, and that’s exactly what Nokia E50 is aiming at as the emphasis is laid on design, good phonebook and applications like Office, PDF Reader, Text to Speech and User-independent Voice Recognition.

E50 is a phone running on Symbian Operating System with Series 60 interface. The version of the interface is v.9.1, which is the latest one up to now – that’s why it’s similar with other phones by the manufacturer, like the E70 and N80 for example. S60 is the most used interface for Symbian, and Nokia has a lot of models using it, while it’s also used by other manufacturers (Siemens, Samsung, Sendo). Unlike the UIQ interface, it still has no touch display support which makes it more similar to WM Smartphones than Pocket PCs.

Besides the business functions the E50 also features the standard multimedia capabilities offered by a Series 60 phone – a camera and music/video player. The camera resolution is only 1.3 megapixels, which is poor according to the current standards as there are already phones with 3-megapixel cameras on the market. But it is not intended to be a key feature of the E50, as the phone even has a version without a camera at all. The camera's interface does not even take up the whole display and the Viewfinder only occupies half of it, while the options available are color effects, white balance and night mode, which almost useless.

As far as picture quality is concerned, the E50 camera definitely can not replace your digital camera and the image quality is a standard one compared to other phones with 1.3-megapixel camera – in order to get the best out of the camera you need a lot of light, but this may also cause overexposure and purple fringing of large areas of the picture. The noise levels are too high when the lighting conditions are not good enough and when taking pictures indoors, it is almost impossible to make them look normal. There’s no flash to help you out in dark conditions and the night mode is useless although the slightly better results.

The conclusion is that Nokia E50 combines high functionality and stylish design with a very good size for a smartphone, but a uncomfortable to use keypad and slow navigation through the menus, which affects the usage of the phone as a whole. In order to make the phone suitable for business users, Nokia has decided to use a powerful battery, a large and bright display and metal parts, but the sound quality and the speed performance are something to complain about – and these are things very important to the business user.

Read full review on phoneArena.

It may look like every other Samsung slider, but the new Z400 will delight fans of the D500 and D600 with its 3G speeds and new-look silver finish. But will it impress us?

Another Samsung, another slider, another day. Perhaps the malaise emanating from 3G is a bit harsh, but one look at the new Z400 and our hearts sink.

3g has a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions: After the delicious touch-sensitive E900 and the slimline D800 we were hoping that Samsung had broken from its creative straitjacket. But for the Z400, the Korean manufacturer has reverted to type, still hawking the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ design ethos we’ve seen on umpteen Samsung sliders before – the E800, D500, D600, E370, the Z320i… the list goes on. It’s a shame Samsung couldn’t conjure up a fresh approach.

Unlike the D600, the camera is perched on the inside of the front fascia instead of the far back cover. Samsung has clearly learnt from its mistakes regarding the lens position on the D600. This handling faux pas saw your finger frequently flirt with the lens but there are no such worries with the Samsung Z400.

Unfortunately, the two-megapixel camera is unsophisticated compared to fellow competitors. There is no auto-focus or flash on the Z400 but considering the restrictions, the pictures appear respectable for this level, displaying true colour representation and strong focus. Understandably, without the flash, it does struggle in low light but you can manually set the ISO light sensitivity setting to compensate. The higher settings (400 and 800) are ideal for indoor environments while we advise 200 for overcast conditions.

Despite video calling becoming something of a marginal activity, the front camera allows two-way chats. We made a call to an LG U890 and found the conversation quality mixed. Symptoms included digital drag and some choppy buffering – but you could still hold a conversation providing you used the supplied headphones to hear the other person’s voice.

Look beyond the lack of originality in the design and you’re still faced with another decent Samsung handset that’s poised to challenge similar 3G tinkers like Sony Ericsson’s K610i and V630i and Nokia’s 6280. It may hit the buffers when it comes to digital music playback but its other attributes more than revive its chances, making it a very capable 3G practitioner.

Read full review on 3g.co.uk.

Samsung SPH-M610 or Ultra Edition 9.9 has been announced for the Sprint network. It looks like Samsung’s SPH-M610 for Sprint is the CDMA version of the 9.9mm thin D830.

The clamshell handset, also known as Ultra Edition 9.9 is said to be EV-DO capable, featuring 2 megapixel swiveling camera, internal QVGA display and external OLED one, TransFlash memory expansion slot and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR with A2DP profile support.

No word on pricing and release date yet.

Via phonearena.

Now I have the Samsung SGH-E900 in my hands. This is another slider and it shares quite a few features with the SGH-D600 such as a 2-megapixel camera and 80MB of built in memory. But of course the SGH-E900 is not a clone of the earlier handset.

Now, I am quite a fan of the slider format. It is ideal for phones designed to be small in the pocket and a good slider lets you do pretty much everything except number dial calls and write SMS messages without using the slider mechanism.

On the size front the SGH-E900 is not quite as small as I’d like at 90 x 45 x 16.5mm, but it is certainly smaller than candy bar handsets. It is light too, at just 93g.

The slider mechanism is superb. Spring loaded, it takes just a slight push or pull to open and close the handset.

The only button on the front fascia is the navigation key. Samsung has used a touch sensitive panel for the rest of the front features. There is no doubting this makes for a very clean design. The front of the handset is sleek, shiny black punctuated by a silver frame around the navigation button, silver central select button, silver Samsung branding and small silver flash under the speaker at the head of the handset.


When you turn the SGH-E900 on its 240 x 320 pixel, 262,000 colour screen is beautifully clear and bright. I can’t complain about the backlight for the touch sensitive area either – the low-light white that pops up when buttons are available is subtle and stylish. I also really like that the three music playback controls (pause/play, forward and back) are only lit up and available when you run the music player.

But touch sensitive buttons just aren’t my thing. Tactile buttons are easy to find without looking too hard for them, and there is a physical response to indicate that you have actually pressed something. The touch-sensitive approach left me often needing to look at the SGH-E900 to be sure I pressed the right area for the action I required. I felt the same when reviewing LG’s revolutionary Chocolate KG800 phone, which also has a touch based interface.

The camera, whose lens is on the back of the casing and invisible unless you open the slider, takes a while to get going after you press its shortcut button, and there is a noticeable shutter lag which means you need to hold the phone still for a second or so after pressing to shoot an image. This will be annoying if you like candid snaps and you’ll get some image blurring if you are not careful.

I wanted to like the Samsung SGH-E900 a lot, having been wowed by the Samsung SGH-D600, but sadly that was not to be. There are some good points, not least its small overall size, light weight and the comprehensive PC connectivity, but the camera is disappointing and overall this handset is hamstrung by the touch based system used on the front fascia.

Read full review here.

Nokia N72 fascinates with its truly genuine design and construction conception. This first impression, however, is not always positive; many people find the phone rather repulsive and not at all attractive. May be this is the phone that has earned the most controversial user opinions. Even our team was divided in two when it comes to the Nokia N72 design.

gsmarena made a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions: The black bar with silver linings shines with glamour but can be hardly considered a classy phone when looked at first sight. Basically, it shines "cheaply". One very interesting moment in its design is the camera lens' cover on its back as it reminds the cover of Sony Ericsson K800. This one is much bigger, of course, and its construction is much worse than the one in the 3.2 megapixel phone.

Nokia N72 has a 2 megapixel camera of a good quality. The lens protecting cover on the back of the phone automatically activates the camera application when slid open. This, however, is not the best solution as it opens unintendedly pretty often. The capture button is situated for horizontal shooting mode but the camera has vertical mode only. This is a bit confusing and the soft key assigned for taking a picture is much better way to capture the picture.

Since the camera in Nokia N72 is identical to the camera in Nokia N70 these is no point in describing the camera in details again. You can read gsmarena's dedicated article about the Nokia N70 camera and the photo shootout between Nokia 7280, Nokia N70 and Sony Ericsson D750 here.

The conclusion is that Nokia N72 is a very controversial phone. It lacks essential features like 3G and Infrared, it has less memory than other phones, the display is rather poor but still it is a pretty good phone. It comes in almost the same price as the N70 model but lacks some features. The main advantage is the tons of software and games for it as it is not a 3rd edition UI. Most probably people who fall in love with its design from first sight will be the main customers. Otherwise, it is hardly possible for Nokia N72 to become a market success.

I, for example, own a N70 and wouldn't change it for a N72 for anything.

Read full review here.