Samsung i780

Full Review

Samsung i780 has an innovative design and a number of features. It is powered by Samsung’s own processor clocking at 624 MHz and 128MB of RAM. It has a 2.55-inch TFT touchscreen of 320x320 pixels resolution, this may pose a problem for some applications designed to work in 320x240. The most unique feature of the phone is the optical joystick which is a touch-sensitive square pad driving the mouse cursor on the screen for navigation. This takes some getting used to and lets users click anywhere on the screen. The phone is quite slim at 12.9mm and is easily pocketable. The full QWERTY keypad is quite comfortable for churning out long messages and e-mail. The phone works on Windows mobile 6.0 professional and comes with Office Mobile for viewing and editing all kinds of office documents but creating presentations is not possible. Multitasking was smooth, so was reading a large document. Pre-installed applications include a PDF reader, RSS reader, Podcast manager, data converter, image, and video viewers. We really loved the inclusion of Opera Mobile which let us do tabbed browsing. Samsung has tweaked the Home screen as well. We liked the easy to access task manager and the mini media player. The call quality is average on the Samsung i780, and the email support for POP3 and IMAP apart from MS Exchange server increases its compatibility. For connectivity, the phone supports EDGE, 3G with HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with A2DP. Unfortunately, the phone did not come with any map software to check out its GPS capability, but when we tried it with Google Maps, the satellite lock happened quite fast as on any other GPS phone. Don’t expect any multimedia nirvana here, though there is no regular port for the headset to begin with, and its 2MP camera is just good enough for capturing MMS clips. As a whole, the i780 is a feature rich smartphone with no compromise on performance. For Rs. 17,260, it’s one of the best Windows Mobile phones available in the market.

Bottom Line

Full featured Windows Mobile phone from Samsung with excellent performance at an affordable price point.