Samsung SGH-D820

By Emily Baxter, CNET.com.au
Jun 26, 2006

From a design perspective, the SGH-D820 is an attractive and slim slider phone with a large 2.12-inch screen and internal antenna. The black design with 262K-color screen looks stylish when closed, however, the operation of sliding it open is a little clunky. It feels somewhat heavy to push open and we tended to hit buttons on the front of the phone when sliding it upwards. This generally means that the incoming call options page or music player facility is accessed accidentally and as a result, on multiple occasions, when opening the phone to answer calls, the caller was cut off. However, you don't need to open the phone to answer it, which means you can avoid cutting off calls.

Design (cont...)
With an incoming call, the LCD screen lights up and displays incoming caller ID. You can accept or reject the call through option buttons on the front of the phone while closed. Otherwise, the keyboard and most of D820's functionality can only be accessed by sliding open the phone.

Inside, the keypad is well set out with plenty of room to tap out messages and dial.

Features
There are several attractive features on the D820 including a 1.3-megapixel camera, video recorder, voice recorder and music player. It has 73MB of internal memory for archiving images, video, music and other data and can store up to 60 minutes of video and a hour's recording of a voice memo. You can increase this capacity by using an external microSD memory card if necessary. The D820's central file manager ensures that data and files for these features can be saved, archived and retrieved, quickly and easily.

The 1.3-megapixel camera requires some working out but once you understands the menu options through the keyboard, image size, quality, balance, exposure and ISO can be set prior to capturing images. This includes a night shot mode. The D820 also lets you select different capture modes --multi shot, single shot and mosaic shot. This last option means that multiple stills can be taken and saved in a single frame enabling some impressive results.

The function keys to change the photo set up options are outlined in the user guide and once you have worked out which buttons do which function, the D820 takes good quality photos although you need to keep the camera as still as possible while capturing the shot to avoid blurring. It also has a rotating lens that is effective for taking shots from different angles.

There is a selection of cute comical frames with birthday, Christmas and general decorative themes as well as emoticons and clip art that you can use to frame your captured photos. There is also an image editor to manipulate the quality of images after they have been taken. You can clear up the focus, change color and balance of the shots--a handy feature to have to clean up shots when required.

The video recorder also records a high quality picture for a mobile phone. In testing the video, there was a good result in many different types of environment, whether the subject is still or moving and it handled different light conditions well. Otherwise, it was also easy to access and again, the file manager ensured that video clips could be stored and recalled quickly.

Text messaging is covered with predictive, ABC and numeric input modes and the D820 allows the user to send out data through various data modes--multimedia and e-mail. The phone offers a calendar, clock, world clock, timer and stopwatch and these are all straightforward to set up although slightly irritatingly, the clock only displays in 12-hour format.

• Most Popular

• Upcoming

What's Hot