Samsung S5230 preview Price , pictures , Details , model specifications
Samsung decided to compete with the popular LG Cookie not in one, but in two ways. We already gave you S5600 and now it’s time to direct the limelight to Samsung S5230. Join us as we take a short stroll with the 3-incher S5230 and see what what it has to offer to the mainstream segment.
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Samsung S5230 is obviously a no-nonsense phones design to appeal to the masses with both its price tag as well its looks, which remind of some the company’s top mobiles. Targeting the midrange market Samsung S5230 joins the ranks of cheap touch phones and one thing’s for sure. It’s not thrown into the fight unprepared.
S5230 is stylish, runs on TouchWiz and can read your written words. Besides it’s a casual snapshot taker with even the oh-so-popular Smile Shot mode and it can easily make your portable music player redundant. That seems enough for us – let’s see with what weapons Samsung are planning to take on the midrange touch wars.
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Samsung S5230 official photo
Samsung S5230 at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar, no keypad
- Dimensions: 104.0 x 53.0 x 11.9 mm, 93.5 gr.
- Display: 3-inch resistive TFT touchscreen, WQVGA resolution (240 x 400 pixels)
- Memory: 87MB, Non-hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
- Camera: 3 megapixel fixed focus camera with smile detection
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
- Misc: Accelerometer sensor, FM radio with RDS, Find Music recognition service, DNSe, Gesture lock
- Battery: 1000 mAh battery
- سعر سامسونج Samsung S5230 Price
Samsung S5230 at our office
The new Samsung S5230 is not something revolutionary; it even cannot be described as evolutionary. It’s just the right kind of feature mix targeted at the midrange market with surgical precision. It seems an even more direct competitor to the already available LG Cookie than the Samsung S5600, but the real head-to-head will take place only when the phone gets out there and starts doing some actual sales. And it’s almost destined to sell well, thanks to its expected low price and the helpful nifty little things that make it special.
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Samsung S5230 compared to iPhone 3G and Samsung S5600
سعر سامسونج Samsung S5230 Price
Join us on the next page for a walkthrough of the Samsung S5230 exterior and ergonomics. Just bear in mind that it’s still a rather early pre-production unit and changes before the actual product is out are quite possible.
Samsung have been using the TouchWiz user interface on all their touch phones ever since Samsung F480 Tocco. Quite expectedly, the Samsung S5230 comes with a slightly updated version of it much like the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH, Beat DJ and S5600. Lively, colorful and pleasantly thumbable – the latest reincarnation of the TouchWiz UI has inherited all the virtues of its predecessors and adds some interesting new stuff.
The heart of the new UI is the widgets – convenient mini-applications for customizing your home screen. Some of the widgets are more practical such as the calendar or the world clock, even the image gallery or the mp3/radio player, while others are just for fun.
Traditionally, all the widgets are stored on a bar on the left which you can toggle by using the small arrow in the lower left corner. You can pick which widgets to display by simply dragging them onto the display and placing them where you want. If you want to remove any of them, all you need to do is drag them back to the bar.
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The TouchWiz UI and the main menu
The new feature on S5230 is the side scrollable home screen. This means you can have up to three different home screens on which to place various widgets on.
Besides the ability to sort your widgets on different desktops, you can also have a single wallpaper for both three homescreens – much like in Android OS. That way if you have an appropriately sized panorama image, you’ll see different parts of it on the three screens.
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The three homescreens
Leaving some the wide-three-part home screen aside the S5230 unit we had didn’t differ much from what we’ve already seen in other Samsung devices.
Samsung promised a new touchscreen feature called Gesture Lock to be present on both the S5230 and S5600. While we didn’t find it on the pre-production S5600, it was available on the S5230 all right.
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Gesture Lock enables users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item or an application, or even dial a contact, just by drawing an alphabet letter on the unlock screen.
Each alphabet letters from A to Z can be used as a gesture to perform the various actions in question. For instance, you can use it to start apps like the music player, messaging menu, the web browser, Java apps or the dialing keypad.
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The gesture settings
Finally, the main menu hides the new Photo contacts feature. It uses a fake 3D environment and shows up to 8 contact pictures in an arc. You can scroll them up and down and dial the one you want. It’s a rather fashionable interface, but we doubt that it will turn practical for everyday use.
The photo contacts
You can still check out some interface screenshots to get an idea of the rest of phone features – file manager, organizer, calendar and FM radio.
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The rest of the UI
A surprisingly nice snapper
The Samsung S5230 features a nice 3 megapixel camera with fixed focus and is capable of taking photos with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels.
The camera does not have auto-focus, but it sports the nice Smile shot feature. Basically when you turn it on, pushing the camera button doesn’t immediately take a picture. On the contrary – it just starts monitoring the framed face and as soon as the person smiles (or at least grins), the handset takes the shot for you automatically.
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The actual pictures taken with the camera are a nice surprise – they have nice details and colors. The noise reduction however is a bit aggressive at times. We certainly don;t like the contrast at this stage but the image processing however is certain to go under more changes.
The overall impression of the captured photos is enough satisfying and you can see it from the samples below:
Camera samples
The camera interface is nicely touch-optimized and is certainly one of the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device so far.
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The camera interface
The video recording capabilities are very poor – only QVGA video at 15fps. But for a cheap and budget touch phones, it is enough. The competing LG Cookie doesn’t offer more too.
Final words
We had an argument here in the office which phone is better – is it the 3G and GPS-equipped S5600 or the S5230, which has a larger, higher-res screen. Of course we didn’t reach an understanding but hopefully end users won’t be victims of similar hesitation. Samsung will probably release the two at different price points.
The comparison between the LG Cookie and the Samsung S5230 finished quite even too. Both handsets pack similar hardware and quite optimized touch software. While the Cookie comes with a document viewer, the S5230 offers more interface features – the Gesture lock, Photo contact manager and camera Smile shot. Still, our personal subjective opinion is that the Cookie is far better looking.
At the end of the day, the choice between the two will be up to you. The retail price will surely have a saying too, but for now we don’t really know what it will be.
