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Samsung GT S5620
by Nepenthe
The Samsung S5620, or Monte, was the closest thing to a smartphone that I owned before my current Galaxy Ace. I can't in all honesty call it a smartphone, as, although it runs a full OS and has true Internet access, the platform doesn't have the extensibility or versatility of a full smartphone. It's a pity, as it has the potential to be ... so much more, if only Samsung would open up the platform.
=The Hardware=
The Monte, as I'll call it for convenience, is a little black plastic oblong with two curved sides and a curved back. It has a bulky plastic surround containing its volume buttons, headphone jack, and micro-USB connection port, which can be either orange or black. It's not exactly a pretty phone; it lacks the grace and visual cleanliness that one would expect from a 2010 smartphone. It's also heavy, coming in at over three ounces.
The TFT capacitative touch screen, despite its 3" size, displays a measly 240 x 400 pixels. I haven't been able to find the processor architecture or clock speed, or RAM specification, but I suspect that they're relatively humble, as the Monte takes its time about loading up. Three buttons at the bottom of the screen control the phone's major functions - confusingly, the "back" button is the middle button, not a side button, which makes the phone quite unintuitive and awkward to use. Not the best of design choices, Samsung.
The Monte packs an at first impressive 3.15 megapixel camera, but its white balance veers towards the blues, regardless of the lighting, and the picture blurs horrendously if your hand shakes ever so slightly.
Internal storage comes in at a mere 200 MB, so it's a good thing that the OS doesn't take up very much space. Contacts and texts alone soon dominate the space, and you'll regularly find yourself deleting texts to make room. The music player feature is practically redundant due to the lack of space.
Still, this is a budget phone, so it's important not to whine too much about the low specification. One thing that increases the reliability of this phone is its moderately good battery life - with infrequent calls and regular texting, I find that the Monte lasts around two days before in need of another shot of mains juice.
=The Software=
The Monte is one of the few phones to run Samsung's Bada OS, the company's attempt to create an OS for budget smartphones, bridging the gap between feature phones and their big brothers. However, it has one crippling shortcoming: Samsung's unwillingness to open up the platform to external developers. It's apparently impossible to write and run new apps for Bada.
The Monte comes with a handful of apps - Twitter, Facebook, the Dolphin browser, a note-taking app, and so on - and a few widgets, including a clock, Google search, and a news ticker. Samsung offers a small "app store", but it contains only extremely rudimentary apps, such as counters for diets or pregnancy. There are no external apps.
Bada runs quite sluggishly, despite its light memory weight, and multitasks like a Tyrannosaurus rex wearing a one-man band kit. It simply doesn't have the efficiency needed to sustain multiple apps simultaneously without significant slowdown. You can hear algorithms groaning as they're calculated at snail's pace.
The Dolphin browser is one of the major features of the phone, but, without such basic features as copy and paste or a competent zoom - there's no multitouch here, so zooming is achieved by long tapping - it's little better than some feature phone browsers. It all too often runs out of memory to load a page, freezes completely with no warning, or simply refuses to open up. I'm sure that an external developer could write a better browser, but Samsung clearly disagrees.
The Facebook app has a mediocre search function, barely, if ever, returning results, and lacks the ability to click through to individual status updates. It also refuses to display new chat messages unless the app is exited and restarted, which makes it fairly close to useless for chat. The Twitter app has similar flaws - the inability to access individual tweets to see replies and to retweet or favourite; the inability to edit one's profile; the terrible, terrible performance in direct messaging; and an inexplicable absence of copy and paste.
=Use as a Telephone=
The Monte's in-call sound quality, both with and without speaker-phone activated, is clean, crisp, and easily audible. It does crackle and break up when reception is poor, but no more so than any other phone when reception is poor.
One unforgivable flaw in the Monte is that it can only display individual text messages. There's no way to display a thread of a conversation in texts, something that many feature phones today can pull off with aplomb. This makes conversations sometimes very difficult to follow, especially if, say, you leave off a conversation one night and attempt to revitalise it in the morning.
Media messaging performance is not the greatest; presumably to save on data, videos and pictures in MMS are only displayed on demand, and they load very, very slowly. Another MMS-related niggle is that, rather than open a consecutive SMS, once the SMS word limit is reached, the system prompts you to switch to MMS. This could lead to rather large texting bills if you aren't careful to decline the Monte's courteous offer.
=Conclusion=
In 2013, Android phones are becoming progressively more affordable. However, in 2010, there was a desperate need for a budget smartphone. Bada ran a serious chance of filling that gap, but, due to its lack of extensibility and versatility, it, and quasi-smartphones like the Monte, fell woefully short.
This is a phone with great potential. With phones such as the Monte, smartphones could one day become universal, with even the poorest able to access the full Internet, a wealth of information, and social networks from their palms. I'm sad that Bada was such a flop, and I'm sad that the Monte has so many flaws.
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