Samsung's current S60 flagship (well, until the next one!) goes under Steve's careful examination...
At first glance, the i550 has got everything. And probably makes its way onto everybody's shopping list for the perfect smartphone. After all, it's a metal-keypadded candybar smartphone running the latest S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. It's got 3.5G, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 3 megapixel camera, a 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD expansion, oodles of free RAM, a 2.6" screen. And it's black and is only 13mm thick! What's not to like?
Unfortunately, one by one, the showstoppers come a-calling, taking a score that should have been heading for 90% down to a meagre 65%. Let's look at the Samsung i550 in detail and I'll explain both the brickbats and the bouquets.
First impressions are good, with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink layout. It's a very solid candybar, moulded in plastic but with a metal keypad plate that lends a touch of class. In addition to the usual S60/smartphone keys, there are shortcut buttons for Web, for GPS Positioning and Media. These three assignments can't, as far as I can see, be changed, which is a shame. The Media button brings up a popup choice of Music Player, RealPlayer and the built-in FM radio.
The keys themselves are largely in 'retro' calculator style (also seen recently on the Nokia N82 - maybe these are in 'fashion'?) but work well enough and are very clearly labelled, in white-on-black. The main display is also very clear, at least indoors, and very colourful, but it does reflect quite badly outdoors, a malaise shared by several of the Nokia Nseries, it has to be said.
In between the two function key blocks is the single biggest innovation by Samsung to the S60 canon: a trackball instead of a d-pad. When the i550 is on, it glows a sexy blue, when the device is charging it turns a fiery red - pretty cool. Unfortunately, there are both design and implementation flaws inherent in putting a trackball into an S60 device.
Counted among the design flaws is that there's now no longer an obvious way to implement 'up and hold' or 'down and hold', for rewind and fast forward in Music Player or RealPlayer, both functions I use a lot. In fact, it turns out that you can use '2' and '8' on the keypad as substitutes in Music Player and '5' and '0' in RealPlayer (nothing like consistency, eh?!), but it's nowhere near as intuitive as using a traditional d-pad. In addition, using a trackball for direction pushes in general is plain awkward a lot of the time, with slight inaccuracies in direction misinterpreted as intentions in other directions. And some games simply won't be playable using this controller.
The implementation flaw is the biggest problem of all. When you nudge a trackball in a direction, you expect the cursor/highlight (as appropriate) to move in that direction. So far so good. When you want to move further, you spin the trackball faster and with more momentum - but the cursor/highlight still only moves a single step. Arggh. No equivalent of holding down a d-pad direction, or even to doing multiple quick d-pad presses. This is obviously a software problem (though see the comment below about future software upgrades) but in the meantime it's very frustrating whenever anything cursor-intensive comes along. Such as moving down an Options menu or scrolling down a web page. Ten out of ten for thinking outside the box, Samsung, but the trackball driver needs quite a bit more work.
Working round the i550's frame, there's:
The back sees a rubber effect battery cover and a basic 3 megapixel camera lens with LED flash and a small aiming mirror. The overall form of the i550 is different to most Nokia S60 designs but does work well, especially viewing the device with a business/productivity 'hat' on. The trackball operation is the only real flaw so far, then.
After power on, most of the S60 interface will be very familiar to every reader of AllAboutSymbian, so I won't dwell on it. There's a certain sense of something being missing though, with the dozen or so add-ons that Nokia likes to festoon their Nseries with all absent. So no Download!, no Share Online, no Podcasting, and so on. I've tried downloading several Nokia utilities separately and installing them on the i550, but they all fail a certificate check on this device, which is a shame, if quite understandable.
One of only two additions made by Samsung to the base S60 application set is, paradoxically, both a huge one and one which isn't hugely relevant. The camera module in the i550 captures video at 352 by 288 pixels by 15 frames per second, with very tinny audio. Which is OK because that's what most devices (short of Nokia N93/N95/E90/N82 spec) also capture. So the inclusion of a full N95-level, originally programmed video editor is both very welcome and a bit puzzling.
As you can see from the screenshots, Video Editor works in three modes: a simple video cutter, a 'muvee'-like composition tool that takes in still photos, and a full storyboard-based video editor that seems to have just as many bells and whistles as the one in the N95 'classic', with video effects, a wide selection of transitions (all gloriously previewed using your live video captures), plus a flexible title composition tool. All very impressive/puzzling for a device which doesn't actually take video that's terribly good. I'm guessing that this software will also be included in future S60 smartphones from Samsung with more of a video specialism.
Staying with camera functions, the 3 megapixel tag is accurate, in terms of overall resolution. And the image quality isn't bad. But the cheap shutter button and the half-hearted camera software make for a disappointing experience. You line up your shot, you press the shutter button to focus, you wait a couple of seconds (too long) while the auto-focus does its thing and then photo gets taken automatically. No waiting while your subject starts to smile or you get to just the right pose - the camera software takes the shot after focussing - and that's it. In practice, this makes the i550's camera all but unusable for anyone with any passion for taking photos of real people. A great shame, and an indication that the camera was a bit of an afterthought on this business-focussed device.
Having looked at Samsung's other new S60 smartphone, the i450, recently, I was expecting good things from the music angle on the i550 and in terms of playback quality I wasn't disappointed, with great bass and treble response. As with the i450, there's a proprietary headset included that plugs into the serial/USB port, and music quality with this was very good indeed, playing back the usual formats (WMA/MP3/AAC etc). There's no fancy equalisation electronics this time though, but the dedicated multimedia/music shortcut key does at least mean that you can get to Music Player quickly, in order to adjust the track (plus there's the usual S60 standby screen music plug-in). There's also the aforementioned 3.5mm jack in case you want to plug in your own headphones or use an FM radio transmitter or other audio accessory.
There's no dedicated speaker in the i550, the main earpiece above the screen has to double up. Predictably, music played in mono this way sounds very tinny, but again this is mainly a business device so it would be churlish to complain too much.
Getting music tracks onto the 140MB of internal flash or (preferably) the microSD card (I was using a 6GB SDHC, proving that the i550 likes these!) was a doddle, thankfully. As with the i450, there's both Windows Media Player sync compatibility and also full USB2 speeds, so putting a dozen ripped CDs onto the i550 in Windows Media Player mode only takes a couple of minutes, which is a refreshing change after some of Nokia's recent devices, running at USB 1.1 speeds.....
Data transfer speeds from phone to PC were similarly fast, although a firmware bug meant that file copies from (Vista) PC to i550's memory card didn't work at all. Very strange. See below for comments on firmware!
Video playback includes H.264 codecs, presumably because of S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 being used, and most videos I tried played OK, albeit at a lower frame rate than on the likes of the Nokia N95 - the lack of hardware acceleration brings playback down to around 10 frames per second. Still, quite usable and the screen's nice and clear at least.
The second Samsung-added application is a licensed copy of Voice Signal, a really effective voice-activated launcher. In my tests it almost always got things right, dialling phone numbers, looking up a specific contact or launching an application. It's a pity the technology's not ready yet for full voice-to-text composition, but Voice Signal worked well, triggered here by a long press on '0' in the standby screen rather than by a side button, as is usually the case with voice control on Nokia devices.
Going online for the first time is made trickier by two factors. One, this being a grey import, the right settings weren't in place for my Vodafone SIM, although when bought in a supported market (e.g. Germany) the network provider would have taken care of this. And, unlike Nokia's S60 smartphones, there's no Wi-Fi scanning function on the active standby screen or 'Search for WLAN' function in the OS [at least, none that appeared in the review unit], meaning that a user has to be pretty knowledgeable about S60 to delve into Settings|Connections|Access points, to set a connection up manually. I had no trouble setting up the i550 for both 3G data and Wi-Fi use but there's no way that a casual user will get very far without lots of help.
Once online, Wi-Fi worked well enough, with similar sensitivity to my Nokia S60 smartphones. Having a shortcut key to Web was a big help when switching between an Internet session and other phone activities. Web itself is a known quantity, although I did notice a new 'Subscribe to web feeds' icon on the popup menu strip when doing a long d-pad/trackball press on a page background.
One of the big selling points of the Samsung i550 is its GPS, of course. Not exactly unique these days, with virtually every new Nokia having GPS, but good to have nonetheless. Our grey import i550 didn't come with any mapping or navigation software, the 'GPS' button was hard coded to the S60 'GPS Data' mini-app, to at least prove that the GPS receiver was working. I loaded up the latest version of Google Maps for Mobile instead and got it working with a little fiddling.
It's not clear where the GPS aerial is positioned on the i550, but I'd rate its sensitivity as equivalent to that in the Nokia N95 but less able than that in the N82, which has the aerial up top. There's provision for network assistance for GPS, but I didn't recognise the assisted-GPS server name in the settings, I guess this is something else that will vary according to the market being sold in. Making allowances for this, GPS performance was acceptable rather than stellar. Walking along a wide open road, the GPS fix did get lost a few times, but I was able to use Google Maps to show me on the planet and also to guide me along a planned route, junction by junction (manually). As with the Samsung i450, Nokia Maps won't install on the i550, but there are plenty of other S60 and Java navigation solutions and I'd expect most of these to work properly here.
The i550 comes with Samsung's own take on PC connectivity, 'PC Studio', seemingly totally incompatible with Nokia's PC Suite - you'd have thought that there would be some degree of interoperability. Ah well. Not wanting to mess up my existing PC Suite installation, I opted to install applications over the air and by .SIS transfer onto memory card, both of which worked perfectly. Although no Nokia-written add-on applications will install here, Google's native Maps worked fine, as did Yahoo Go, Frozen Bubble, Y-Browser, Magi-Mix, Screenshot (duh!), Calcium and Best TaskMan. emTube (and its associated PIPS libraries) didn't quite work, giving a mux error at playback time, and Google's auto-detection of the i550 meant that I couldn't install the Java GMail client ('Not found'). A small application sample, but I'd guess than the majority of S60 software will run fine here, though certainly not all.
Coming to the i550 from the relatively cosy and well supported world of Nokia, I have to say that I have a few concerns about support. Samsung are notoriously bad at thinking of the UK, a prime market, when considering their S60 smartphones and as a result most owners will be buying 'blind', with no opportunity to try the device first, no easy way of getting technical support, little or no chance of new firmware to fix the inevitable bugs (e.g. a restart when unplugging the headset, GPS invisibility sometimes, the file copy bug mentioned above, to name but three - I'm sure there's a lot more).
Add in configuration problems in that you'll have to set the device up from scratch for connectivity and work through a number of application compatibility issues, and you have a recipe for a headache. AND you'll have to do without all the useful extras from Nokia, i.e. Podcasting, Internet Radio, Mobile Search, Maps, Location Tagger, Share Online, and so on.
Add in as well the trackball oddities, the poor screen contrast outdoors and the appalling camera shutter button and you start to see why I can't really recommend the Samsung i550 to anyone but S60 die-hards who relish a challenge.
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian and the Smartphones Show, 26 March 2008
Postscript: Having written the above, with the grey import device in mind, for general AAS users, it's worth pointing out that the score would be quite a bit higher (perhaps 75%) for a German user, buying the i550 on contract for free on a German network, properly pre-configured.
Supplementary photos:
The i550's display in sunlight. Not the worst I've seen, but nowhere near as clear as that on the likes of the Nokia N95 and E61.
The tethered card slot cover, nicely done
The glowing trackball is a nice touch, even if the software's not quite ready yet
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