By Juniper Foo
05/07/2007
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,40148669p,00.htm

Pictures simply do not do the E590 justice. It's when you clap eyes on it the very first time that you realize how truly tiny it is in hand. And despite its deceptively sparing (read: sparse) looks, Simple Simon it ain't. There's a lot more going on inside this wee 66g camera-phone than meets the eye. More importantly, we've waited a long time for Samsung to break away from its customary mold to surprise us. And, at last, it's done just that.

Editors' note: According to Samsung, the SGH-E590 is expected to debut in Asia in the third quarter of this year.

Design

	The E590 comes with a Bean Bag pouch that doubles as a camera tripod. (click for larger image)

Much of the design credit goes to industrial designer Jasper Morrison. In a sea of lookalike sliders and clamshells and showy handsets with oft-times impossible-to-use keys, the E590 takes a refreshingly understated route. Perhaps inspired by the Apple design creed, Morrison has kept his creation dead simple: You get a screen, some buttons and a camera at the back. Even the phone colors are downright plain: A choice of white text on a black base or black text on a silver background. It's all in smudge-free plastic, though you never once feel that it's plasticky.

The only concessions to its designer roots are the decision to name the colors Noble Black and Snow Silver, and the odd bundling of a Bean Bag which serves as a camera tripod. It's certainly an interesting accessory, though one that's likely to end up as a phone holder on your desk.

Features
So what do we get for shelling out S$400 (without a plan)? Quite a bit considering its price and size. Having refined the science of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into its Ultra Edition series, the E590 is great value in the pocket, provided you're not a mobile geek who likes your handset bursting with functionality at every button press.

There's triband support, GPRS, Bluetooth 2.0 and a USB 2.0 port. An internal memory of 90MB is supplemented by a microSD card slot. The E590's media player can support MP3, AAC, AAC+, e-AAC+ and WMA formats. There's also a voice recorder, FM radio, Java and browser. For gamers, note that the E590 has no dedicated games folder. Instead, we found this under Applications in the Java World folder.

	The E590 is available in black and white color options. (click for larger image)

The camera amazed us with a 3-megapixel autofocus sensor with half-shutter, a panorama shot feature, an intuitive user interface, and even a dedicated zoom rocker (although this is digital rather than optical). The camera keys lie along the right edge of the phone; the volume, USB/charger port and card slot sit on the left side. There's a Mode button on the top right side of the E590 which comes on only in camera mode. This triggers a mode list for Camera, Camcorder, Folders and Settings, but strangely doesn't toggle it off. You'll need to depress another key to do that.

Here's where we understand why Morrison has thrown in a Bean Bag tripod--there's no photolight. So low-light settings will require some tripod assistance. And in keeping with the clean lines, there's no lens cover or self-portrait mirror; the latter's hardly worth nitpicking over unless you're overly fond of your own mug.

Needless to say, the screen remains true to its Samsung heritage. At 262K colors, the TFT 220 x 220-pixel screen is big, bright and clear enough for a phone this tiny. However, under bright sunlight, we barely made out the display, although the super-huge fonts helped some.

Performance And Battery Life
It's all very well to have a great-looking phone, but can it deliver? First thing, we made a call. Voice quality was great through the handset, although if you are using the speakerphone, note that the sound box tends to vibrate on high volume settings, which tended to have a grating effect on sound quality.

	The E590 features a 3-megapixel camera with half-shutter autofocus. (click for larger image)

We had the same problem when piping music to the rear speaker. So be prepared for some strident playback as anything musical would be rendered harshly at top volume. On lower settings, the playback felt almost tinsy to our ears, when we compared this side-by-side with a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone.

What's nifty is this Samsung's ability to channel the radio through to the speaker, although remember to keep the headset plugged in as it does double duty as the FM antenna. As for the radio, this automatically called up the various stations, and we were able to tune in effortlessly. There are useful little features inside such as program reminders and setting as alarm.

On the music player front, Samsung users should be familiar with the interface. It's easy enough to load up and play, with four-equalizer settings (rock, classic, jazz and normal), and sounds fairly decent though the bundled headset. There were a couple of bum raps, however. Firstly, the headset port is located awkwardly mid-point on the left edge with the cable pointing down--not great if you're listening to the radio or music player with your phone in your pocket. Additionally, as the headset shares the same port as the USB charger and cable, you won't be able to charge, transfer files and plug into the E590 at the same time.

It was quick enough navigating through the menus, with a joystick stub that was nicely responsive for shortcuts and directional movement. Our only peeve was that clicking down on the joystick brings you to the WAP browser. Sony Ericsson users will find it trying at first as their joystick tends to cut straight through to the main Menu.

The E590 faltered a little when it came to texting with key sounds on. Here, we found a slight lag between keypresses and the words appearing. However, disabling the sound seemed to resolve the issue.

This being a camera-phone, we naturally expected it to zip through its paces. Holding the shutter button down brought us into camera mode, while there were enough iconized settings to play around with, from macro to ISO. The panorama mode allowed us to snap off three shots before it automatically stitched these into one seamless image. Oddly, for a handset that it's branding as a camera-phone, Samsung has been remiss in bundling in some digital imaging software.

In fact, you'll need a third-party digital imaging app. With the images transferred to a PC, we found the focus tended to be centered, with the edges appearing somewhat muffled. We also had to experiment with the White Balance setting to get the best color balance as the indicated WB did not always perform as expected.

What we sorely missed was an LED photolight or even a Xenon flash. That said, most camera-phones work best in brightly lit surrounds as even the highest-resolution sensor and autofocus aren't going to perform miracles in dim settings. Remember to at least wipe the lens free of oil and prints before shooting as there's no lens cover to protect the glass.

The E590 comes with a 3.7v Lithium-ion battery. Manufacturer claims put talktime as 4 hours and standby as 8.3 days (200 hours). In our tests, it went through the rigors of playing music, taking photos, listening to the radio, and chitchat and maximum brightness setting over one day before a charge-up was needed. Considering the wagonload of features it has to bear in such a compact size, this is to be expected. Fortunately, the charging plug is the same one used in Samsung's Ultra Edition series and some of its latest mid- to high-end phones, which means you can share chargers with other Samsung users in your office.

Conclusion
As a non-designer designer phone, not everyone will be a fan of the E590. But for those looking for a second phone or a fuss-free candy bar you won't even notice in your pocket, the E590 might well be to Samsung what the iPod is to Apple--minimalist, simple and fun to use.