Samsung F210 Review
The F210 is a great phone concept. It's a phone/music player/camera in a tiny lightweight package. Weighting just 72g, it's fantastically light and it's so compact you risk losing it in your handbag! The secret to its tiny size is the swivel design. As you can see from the photo, when closed the F210 resembles an iPod Nano, with an LCD screen and metal jog dial showing. With the jog dial and side volume controls you can access the music functions even with the phone closed. When you want to make a call, you flick the phone and it spins open to reveal a full keypad. We're delighted to see that the keypad has a regular 3-column layout, unlike the F210's predecessor, the X830, which had a 2-column layout and was harder to use. It's narrower than typical phones, but the keys are a good size and pose no problems. Overall it's a really nice phone to use. The user interface changes depending on whether the phone is open or closed to display phone menus or music menus. The styling is gorgeous with the metallic edging and jog dial, and the use of specially-designed stunning screen graphics. If you want to, you can hang the phone around your neck, with the "lanyard", a kind of one-piece necklace that also holds your earphones.
The F210 is a great music player. It can handle all popular music formats including full Digital Rights Management. The Music Library makes it easy to manage your music and create playlists on the go. You can use the built-in equaliser to adjust sound quality. Audio playback through the loudspeaker can sound a bit tinny, but plug in headphones or use a set of wireless Bluetooth headphones, and you can listen to high quality music. The phone comes equipped with 1 Gbyte of flash memory, which is enough to store around 250 songs. In addition this can be expanded to a total of 3 Gbytes by adding a microSD memory card (up to 2 Gbytes). This would be enough for around 750 songs, making the F210 into a replacement for an iPod Nano.
As well as the music player, the F210 also has a built-in FM radio. This is equipped with RDS (Radio Data System), which displays the station ID, radio show name, song title, artist and more. Samsung have introduced a cool feature into the F210: use the built-in sound recorder to record a few seconds of any song that you're listening to, and the system will identify the artist and song for you. This is very similar to Sony Ericsson's TrackID™, used on its Walkman phones.
