By Damian Koh
13/05/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,42657614p,00.htm

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.

Features

One of the main features of the Soul is the touch-sensitive navigation control panel under the screen. Samsung dubs it the Magic Touch by DaCP. When at the default Home screen, the panel shows four shortcut icons which can be customized to display shortcuts to applications that you use often. The center lets you get to the main menu. Once in the main menu, the center turns into an OK button, while the four around it become arrows for navigation. The disconcerting part is switching between using the touch-sensitive panel and the conventional left/right hard buttons. But that's probably something which we can get used to over time.



This key morphing feature extends into other applications such as the music/video player and the camera. So what you have is a control panel that is contextually relevant and that we felt is executed well on the Soul. Even though the navigator doesn't physically depress, there is feedback in the form of a tiny vibration whenever it is touched.

There are three intensity levels of forced feedback and sensitivity settings which you can choose from. The lowest of the latter will require pressing down hard on the panel to simulate the use of a hard button. The color scheme of the "buttons" on this panel can also be changed in the settings to suit your profile theme.



The remapping concept is not new, of course. It is similar to the Optimus Maximus keyboard by Russian design firm Art Lebedev, with keys that have an OLED display each so they can display appropriate icons aside from the letters in the QWERTY layout. LG also has a similar "split screen" design on the KF600. Everytime we access a different part of the phone's interface, the navigation area at the bottom changes the displayed keys to suit our needs. The difference is that LG opted to leave out hard buttons entirely and the width of the second panel is the same as the main LCD screen.

Interface-wise, we felt the Soul adopted a much simpler approach as the panel is used mainly as navigation keys with useful shortcuts in the camera, music/video player and calculator apps. The KF600, on the other hand, sports a more interesting UI that changes depending on which app you are using.

The Soul comes with three default user themes. That's hardly ground-breaking, but what's appealing is the extent of customization that a user can perform to create a user-specific theme. The Easy level allows us to change basic parameters such as image and color, while the Expert mode takes customization to a whole new level with options to set backgrounds, icons and fonts.

Even though the Soul isn't marketed as a smart phone, it's unforgivable that the Subject and Location fields in the calendar are limited to only 15 letters. It was the same problem we had with the SGH-F700, only worse on the F700 since the information in the Contacts and Calendar didn't get ported over to the handset in its entirety when syncing with Microsoft Outlook.

If you are willing to look past the shortcoming or reckon it's irrelevant, then the Soul has an impressive list of specifications. The tri-band GSM radio will probably affect only those who reside in the US, but other than that connectivity features include HSDPA and Bluetooth stereo A2DP. There's also a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with face detection and onboard image-editing capabilities (more on this in the Performance section). The bundled stock earbuds plug in via the proprietary connector, which was a pity since a 2.5/3.5mm audio socket would have completed the whole package.

Performance

If there's something lacking in the Soul, it would be its tiny 880mAh Lithium-ion battery. During our review, the cell lasted barely 1.5 days when we streamed music via A2DP and logged onto the Internet using HSDPA, on top of the usual calls and text messages. Actual times will vary according to the usage, but it would have been in Samsung's favor to ship a larger-capacity battery with the Soul considering its heavy-laden features. Call audio quality was good on regular calls and the speakerphone was decent during video calls. The party on the other end of the line reported smooth transitions while we were panning using the video call camera.

Another issue with the Soul and most of the recent Samsung models was that screen legibility dropped to a dismal level under direct sunlight. This made it hard to use the phone outdoors without squinting and even more difficult to frame pictures.

The camera's shutter lag was 0.7 second. That's hardly stellar timing, though it didn't fare any worse than most of the higher-end camera-phones out there. At a maximum 2,560 x 1,920 resolution, each picture averaged at 2MB. The disappointing part about video recording was its limited QVGA resolution. We also found browsing images on the phone a bit sluggish.

Picture quality-wise, we compared it with a Sony Ericsson K850i currently in our Labs. Colors appeared more saturated on the K850i, and in macro mode the Sony Ericsson was able to retain more details while the Soul tended to expose the highlights. It's hard to tell at this point which is the better camera. We'll leave that to a proper shootout, involving the Nokia N82 and N95 as well.

Suffice to say, we were rather impressed with the general image quality we saw from the Soul. The face detection feature was passable. Even though it managed to detect multiple faces, when we half-pressed to focus, only one face was focused. Our other quibble lay with the flash. We found it too harsh and it's likely you'd end up with an overexposed face with dark background if you were taking a snap in a dimly lit environment. The onboard editing features won't replace full desktop programs, but it did help correct some of our images on-the-fly.

Final Thoughts

Many phones pass through our hands each week and it's hard for any handset to make any lasting impression. The Soul is different. From the first time we clapped eyes on the handset until the review, we are still in love with its sleek looks. That said, the Soul isn't perfect: Small battery capacity, legibility issues with the LCD under direct sunlight and sluggish picture browsing. If you've skipped through the whole review to get to the summation and if you can live with the problems we've mentioned, then the Soul is probably the next handset you should consider getting. It isn't a one-trick wonder and doesn't try to be, and at a retail price of S$758 (S$298 on a two-year contract with SingTel), it's definitely a handset worth considering.