Product Listing

Special Preview: Samsung Soul

By Sutlej Soin - 20 Feb 2008

A Touch of Magic for the UI & Closing Comments

A Touch of Magic for the UI

In the centre of the Soul, is the "Magic Touch" screen. This feature only applies to menu navigation and icon indicators as the soft keys take on the traditional non-touch sensitive buttons. When activated, the icons on the Magic Touch screen change according to the function used on the application.

For example, when in music mode, music related icons will appear like the play/pause button and so on.

And in camera mode, icons such as zoom and flash will appear. This helps considerably in our opinion when you want to forward a song quickly or zoom in on a subject without going through subsequent menus.

An apparent downside of the Soul that we noticed almost immediately was that it lacks the standard 3.5mm audio jack. However, you can always use a Bluetooth headset for listening to music as it supports the A2DP profile. Even then, in our opinion that's a glaring oversight for these days, especially on a high-end phone that's meant to please a wide crowd.


Closing Comments

To sum it all up on three key factors, the Soul first and foremost, is as always with most Samsung handsets, a stylish and slim handset. The top-up of features notwithstanding the standard set of features in the Soul will give much joy to users, who want to do more, i.e. either planning to shoot a high quality image or surf the Internet at blazing speeds and proves to be a worthy successor to the existing Ultra edition phones. That said, the Soul is even a good upgrade to the G600 and perhaps even the G800 handsets for those not too demanding on photo functionality but want a good all-rounder. Lastly, the new navigation pad interface is certain to give you much ease in accessing your most used applications and functions.

As pricing is always an important factor that makes or breaks the uptake of any product, we can only pray that the price of the Soul will be pegged somewhere sane - perhaps priced between the G600 and the G800 handsets. The Soul is expected to be made available in Europe from April, but Asian markets are expected to have the phone in the June of 2008. That's an excruciating wait for those of us in Asia, but we certainly hope the wait is worth it.

A final parting shot of the Samsung Soul.

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