Samsung i300 smart phone

Posted by T3 Online on Mon 29 Oct 2007

Samsung's latest phone is small in size but BIG on storage.

Phones with hard drives are like Premiership titles for Chelsea. You wait ages for one and then two come round the corner one after the other. Last month it was Nokia's N91 and now Samsung is stuffing a drive into one of its handsets.

Unlike Chelsea, the addition of a 3GB drive to Samsung's latest baby hasn't made its head swell to unbearably large proportions. It runs Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5 software, and while it's not as tiny as something like the SPV C500, it's certainly nowhere near as hefty as the aforementioned N91.

One of the main benefits of putting a hard drive in a phone is that it can double as a music player. This handset can store around 750 tracks in MP3 format, and Samsung has equipped it with a bespoke media player for music playback.

Library navigation is nowhere near as quick or straightforward as on the Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman phone, but you can pick tracks by artist or song title and the circular pad in the centre works like a scaled-down iPod Click Wheel, so you can zip through long lists quickly. The sound quality is pretty good with a crisp high end and enough bass to keep Barry White fans satisfied, and the phone also boasts built-in stereo speakers that are among the best we've heard.

Other goodies include a 1.2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth and the usual array of Windows Mobile applications for viewing Office documents. In fact, the only major failing is the battery, which provides a meagre three hours talk time.

Ignore that and you've got a cool, versatile handset with plenty of storage. Back of the net.