Samsung Soul

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Announced a few days before the Mobile World Congress this year, the Soul is supposed to be an abbreviation of "The Spirit of Ultra" and was so named to honor the completion of the Ultra Edition series. As a flagship product for Samsung in 2008, the Soul (also known as the SGH-U900) has a lot to deliver, including a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, a touch-sensitive control pad and 3G with HSDPA connectivity.

Design

The Samsung Soul is a mite thicker (12.9mm) than some of the Ultra Edition handsets that came before it, but the more important point is the phone fits comfortably in the hand and feels very well-built.

The slider moves up and down smoothly and the metallic finish gives a premium feel to the handset. We noticed the Soul slopes down gently along the bottom of the top frame which we reckon is either for aesthetic reasons or to assist the thumb in sliding up the phone. It doesn't offer much practicality, though, since most of the time our thumb pushed the slider up from somewhere between the LCD screen and the control panel.

Although the numeric keypad is flush with the inner surface, the keys are well spaced-out with defining horizontal ridges and don't fare any poorer than most other phones with slide-out keypads. It also helps that the top row of the keypad are shortcut keys to video calls, cancel and task manager, so your thumb wouldn't bump against the bottom edge of the top half when typing.

We aren't easily impressed by design claims because there are bound to be some areas that could have been done better. But on the Soul, it's hard to have any misgivings on the overall design of the phone and its keypad.

Elsewhere, the microSD expansion card slot and the camera shutter marked in red are on the right edge of the handset, while the volume bar and proprietary port connector are found to the left. Above the 2.2-inch QVGA screen is a front-facing camera for video calls and onboard speaker grill.

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