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You just couldn’t have missed the Samsung Corby. Dirty cheap phone with replaceable rear covers and more clones than features. That’s the one. Newsflash: the outbreak of cheap as chips touchscreen handsets continues now that we have the Lindy – fresh off Corby’s rib.

Here’s the deal. Samsung want to put a touchscreen in every pocket but the Lindy is also trying to give fast data and WLAN to the masses. It’s all Corby on the surface – to the extent that you will want to put some of Corby’s fashion jackets on the Lindy. They won’t fit but that’s not the point. The point is the Lindy is a plain and friendly touchscreen that puts a bargain price on all-round functionality.

Someone at Samsung must be in love with the Corby concept since the family is getting bigger by the day. The number of Corby sequels is beyond belief: the QWERTY packing CorbyPRO and CorbyTXT were followed by the Wi-Fi enabled, but still rumored S3650W and – finally – out came the M5650 Lindy. Not to mention the several handsets that don’t exactly follow the same design outline but have the same naming in certain regions – Samsung B3313 Corby Mate, Samsung CorbyPlus B3410 and Samsung C3510 Corby Pop.

Samsung M5650 Lindy official photos

The Samsung Lindy however inherits all the traditions of the original – neat and friendly plasticky design, rich social integration, modern interface with the optional cartoonish graphics on top and the most important thing – a capacitive touchscreen with an affordable price. But like all the other new members of the family, the Lindy tries to break out of the clone syndrome by offering its own special powers. Wi-Fi connectivity, 3.5 mm audio jack and dedicated music keys put it well above the basic Corby.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/EDGE, UMTS 900/2100, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
• 2.8″ capacitive TFT touchscreen of QVGA resolution, 256K colors
• 50 MB onboard storage, microSD card slot (up to 8GB)
• 3 megapixel auto-focus camera with smile detection, QVGA video @ 15fps
• Secondary video-call camera
• Dedicated music controls on the front panel
• Wi-Fi connectivity
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
• microUSB slot
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• DNSe and SRS sound effect
• Excellent audio reproduction
• FM radio with RDS
• Find Music recognition service
• TouchWiz and Cartoon UI
• Office document viewer
• Smart unlock
• Social networking integration with direct file uploads
• Quite reasonably priced for a full touch Wi-Fi enabled phone (around 160 euro)

Main disadvantages

• No accelerometer for screen auto rotation
• No on-screen QWERTY keyboard
• No smart dialing
• microSD slot under the battery cover
• Music controls only work on the homescreen

The Corby need not feel threatened: the intended markets are poles apart. The new features raise the M5650 above the rank and file and straight into the mid-range, while the Corby is very much an entry-level kiddie phone. Wi-Fi is welcome, but this is not the only upgrade that the Lindy offers over the Corby. It loves music and has dedicated media controls right up front, DNSe and SRS surround enhancements and the 3.5 mm audio jack of course. We nearly forgot the fast network data speeds. And then all of a sudden, the Lindy costs the same as the S3650 Corby did at launch.

Samsung M5650 live shots

So, we have to admit that Samsung have flooded the market with similar handsets. There’s the Star, Star Wi-Fi, Star TV, the Corby bunch, the Diva and the Marvel. The Lindy looks set to lead in both features and design, but it’s not like we haven’t seen all this before. Will it succeed to stand out among so many siblings? And more importantly, can it stand up to the competition? The journey begins with design and ergonomics.

Corby-styled TouchWiz

The M5650 Lindy offers three different homescreen panes that you can alternate by sideways sweeps. The current selection is indicated by three bars at the top of the screen. But that’s nothing new, since almost every TouchWiz handset offers that. In fact, the whole UI is the same as the youthful S3650 Corby.

You can fill up each of those homescreen panes with as many widgets as you like. The different wallpapers are actually three parts of a single panoramic desktop, just like on the Samsung S8000 Jet.

In case some of you have missed it, widgets are nifty mini-apps that reside on your home screen. Some of them seem to have more purpose, such as the calendar and world clock, image gallery or the mp3/radio players, while others range from fun to pointless.

Traditionally, all the TouchWiz widgets are stored in a tray running down the side of the screen, which you can pull in and out as needed using the small arrow in the lower left corner (or alternatively, by tapping on a blank space on the screen).

You can pick which widgets to display by simply dragging them onto the display and placing them where you want. If any need to be removed, you simply drag them back to the tray.
The TouchWiz homescreen • the main menu

The homescreen and the new icon graphics aside, the rest of the M5650 Lindy interface is typical Samsung (or at least the latest revision seen on the Samsung Jet). You have a tab at the bottom of the display which holds the three context keys with varying functionality based on the currently active menu. There are also some nice animations and transition effects throughout the interface.

The main menu displays as a 3 x 4 grid of icons, while sub-menus appear as lists. The main menu itself, as on the Samsung S3650 Corby, stretches over three different screens and is sweep-scrollable sideways. The reason that so much more space was needed is the fact that almost all apps are now brought to the main menu, arranged in a flat iPhone-like structure. You will only need to dig deeper for the settings but if those were also brought to the fore, the main menu would most certainly have become a huge mess.

Much like on the Samsung Jet, you can freely rearrange the items in te main menu to suite your needs.

The Samsung M5650 Lindy also supports multitasking, which means that Java applications can be minimized to run in the background. However, there is no hardware key to allow you to switch between the apps, which certainly makes multitasking much less of a treat.

Samsung have also enabled the M5650 Lindy with the Smart unlock feature, previously known as Gesture lock. Smart unlock allows users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item, application – even dial a contact – just by drawing a letter on the unlock screen.

Smart unlock

Each letter from A to Z can be set as a gesture by the user 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.

The M5650 Lindy sports the Corby’s cute little theme designed especially for this handset’s young audience, part of the whole dynamic Cartoon UI thing that was much advertised by Samsung.

The youth theme

The usual phonebook

The phonebook of the Samsung M5650 Lindy has it all. Up to 2000 contacts can be stored with multiple fields. It can display the names on the SIM card, the phone memory or both at once. Searching is done by gradual typing of the desired contact’s name.
The Lindy phonebook

Quite a number of different detail fields are available for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers, 4 email addresses, URLs and so on. Each contact can also be assigned a specific ringtone and picture, as well as a note. You can even set a video as “caller’s ID”.

Telephony

The Samsung M5650 Lindy is excellent at its main job – making calls – we experienced no reception or voice quality drops for the time of our review.

There’s not much to say about the dialer. You dial just like you would on any touch phone. There are three virtual buttons – phonebook, more and back. When you type a number or look it up in the contact list, by tapping More you can access options like voice call, video call, send message or add to phonebook. Of course you have the hardware call buttons too.
Making a call • the virtual keypad

Unfortunately the handset has no smart dialing, which could have saved the users some digging in the phonebook.

While the dialer itself is not very interesting, there’s a flashier way to dial. The Photo Contacts are shown as a stack of pictures. Tapping on a photo brings up a menu with options to start a voice call or send a message. The Photo Contacts have changed since the last implementation of the TouchWiz UI in the Jet and they now automatically store picture links to the most used contacts, just like in the Corby. The option to tag people’s faces is no longer available. The feature makes more sense now as it’s fully automatic and as long as you have assigned images to your contacts, you’ll be alright.

Messaging does the job, still no virtual QWERTY

As you might expect, the Samsung M5650 Lindy handles all common message types. The handset has a shared editor for SMS and MMS and a separate one for emails. A rich T9 dictionary is at the user’s disposal too. There is no landscape QWERTY keyboard available here, perhaps due to the small screen size. Still, we would have preferred it if users had the choice to make for themselves.
Messages menu • composing an SMS

There is also a native email client. It does not have an option for automatical settings retrieval so we had to enter them manually, but once that’s done, emailing is a breeze.

The attachment limit for sending is 5MB, which is enough for most file types. If you receive an office document as an attachment, you will be able to view it as well thanks to the integrated office document viewer.

Social networking does the basic job

As promised, the M5650 Lindy comes with social integration disguised as four neat homescreen widgets – MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Bebo.

All four widgets have similar interface – a big update button at the top, a text field for your current mood/status message and some buttons at the bottom.

In the MySpace widget the available options include checking your messages, getting into chat and adding friends. The Facebook widget offers checking your messages, adding new friends and its last option is poking a friend. Finally, the Twitter widget has only two virtual keys – friends and followers. The Settings button is available everywhere offering options for auto-refresh and adding a photo.
MySpace, Facebook and Twitter widgets • Settings

As you see, the widgets aren’t exactly full of features, but the basics seem covered. They are more than enough to keep you connected to your social circle on the go.

There is one problem though – the widgets can only use network data, not the wireless connectivity. It’s not like they will involve a lot of traffic, but still you will need some kind of data plan.

Social networking integration stretches even further to having a dedicated item in the main menu. The Communities item gets you links to websites such as Facebook, Picasa and Flickr and the ability to directly upload files. You can also preset your login details so you don’t have to enter them each time you access those websites or try to upload content from the file manager – the M5650 Lindy stores your credentials for you.
Communities list • Settings • Uploading a photo

That pretty much covers what Samsung have been doing in the social networking department. Unfortunately, there’s no phonebook integration such as in the HTC Sense UI on the Hero and the HD2 or the MotoBLUR UI on the Motorola Dext.

No matter how limited, the controls available on the Samsung Lindy allow you to chat, update your status, post tweets, upload photos and read your friends’ new posts.

Fast file browser

The M5650 Lindy’s file browser can display the files and folders in the phone memory or the memory card, and both at once.

There are folders for different types of files (images, video, sounds) to let the handset sort the memory contents. However, you are not forced to follow this structure – you can place your files wherever you want and the phone will have no problems handling them.
The file browser is quite efficient

You can copy or move files – both one by one or in bulk, and you can create and delete new folders (except the root folders, like Images, Sounds and so on).

Files can also be sent via Bluetooth, one by one again, or in bulk. Throughout the whole file manager you can pick files you would like to lock to prevent accidental deletion.

Reading the memory card is quick and won’t bother users at all. Listing the thumbnails of pictures stored in the respective folder on the memory card is quite fast too.

The initiatialization speed of the memory card is surprisingly fast: regardless of the capacity, the M5650 Lindy recognizes a memory card in 10-15 seconds. The phone comfortably handles a 16GB microSD card full of thousands of different files. Working with the files on the memory card once it’s initialized is fast enough to satisfy most users; however, speed does drop when the card starts filling up.

Gallery is basic, but gets the job done

Unlike some previous Samsung devices like the S8300 UltraTOUCH and just like the S3650 Corby, the M5650 Lindy has only one picture gallery. However, the gallery it does have is fully functional. You’ll most likely not miss the Photo browser despite its eye-catching qualities.

The M5650 Lindy gallery is an inherent part of the file manager and launching it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep your fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. Browsing the images is really fast and responsive with no lag thanks to the capacitive screen.

Zooming in is easy enough though not as responsive as we would have like it. You have the one-finger zoom but it kicks in after you spend some considerable amount of time (like 3 sec) touching the image with your thumb. From there on it’s just a matter of dragging your finger up for zooming in and down for zooming out.

There is a second zoom control which is more conventional – a zoom bar with thumbable icons that allows you to actually zoom with tapping instead of dragging.

Browsing images in landscape mode is also available. As there’s no accelerometer for automatic rotation, you can switch to landscape view via the dedicated on-screen button.

Music player and FM radio

The music player of the Samsung M5650 is exactly the same as in the Jet and Star and hasn’t been altered much from the M8800 Pixon.

It allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn’t seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background. In that case though, you won’t be able to control it with the hardware music keys unless you’re on the homescreen. Another thing to note is the absence of virtual on-screen music buttons (skip, play, pause) in the music player interface. You get larger album art instead.
The music player does the job

The music player also has a dedicated homescreen widget, allowing quick access to the full version of the application with only a single tap. The equalizer selection offers the standard presets like pop, jazz, classic, etc. but it also packs three additional options – widening, dynamic and surround effects.

Last, but certainly not least, the player is nicely touch-optimized to include fast forward and rewind, just like on the S5600. This adds up to an excellent music application that can fully replace your portable MP3 player.

The Samsung M5650 Lindy features an FM radio with RDS. The M5650 Lindy’s radio app offers intuitive controls and has the Find Music recognition service implemented, which works much like Sony Ericsson’s TrackID.
The FM radio application o the radio and player widgets

The radio app is in the Applications menu but the Radio widget on the home screen gives you more immediate access. Tapping on it brings up the radio or you could just use the widget’s controls to start/stop the radio or change the station. It can only skip between saved stations though, and if you want to search you’ll have to do it in the actual app.

Speaking of stations, you can save stations but they are labeled just by their frequency and you can’t rename them. There’s a separate list for your favorite stations though.

Splendid audio output

The audio quality of the Samsung M5650 Lindy is pretty fine and certainly that best that we have witnessed from Samsung recently. All readings rank as at least “good” by our books, while some are even downright excellent.

The frequency response is spot on for most of the range with the slight bend that you see at the graph below being mostly outside the audible frequencies. Unlike the Corby, the Lindy has great stereo crosstalk and near perfect distortion levels.

The noise level and dynamic range are among the best we have seen so it makes up for quite a formidable package indeed.

Here goes the table and the graph so you can see for yourselves.

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