Samsung Corby review

The Samsung Corby is Samsung's bold step into the land of the lifestyle-oriented, sub-Rs 10,000 smartphone. We have hands-on look at the device at its launch to see how it stacks up against the influx of smartphones we’ve already seen this year.

The Corby's gimmick, if we are to call apples, pretty as they may be, apples , is that a selection of interchangeable backplates is available, featuring either block colour or a pattern. Samsung urges you to ’choose your colour’ and let your Corby reflect your own personality.

Much as this is a rather reductive step - we’re people, not a square on a colour chart - and something that harks back to the days when third-party body shells were available for just about every major phone around, it’s something that could well prove essential to the Corby range's success.

You see, behind the colourful marketing, the Corby - known in some territories as the Corby Ginio Touch - is in many ways a rather pedestrian phone, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you consider Samsung is essentially trying to once-and-for-all bridge that final gap between feature phones and smartphones.

One thing they have got right in the basic design is the form factor. The Corby is simple, fairly slim and plain enough to let the colourful backplates do most of the talking. The device itself is something of a blank canvas.

It uses Samsung’s proprietary Touchwiz OS, which let you place a wide selection of widgets on three home screens. As you might expect from a lifestyle-focused device, these include social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It remains a competent system, but next to Android, especially tweaked versions like MotoBlur and HTC Sense, it doesn’t exactly look state of the art.

However, ‘state of the art’ status isn’t the Genio’s intention, as the rest of the spec list will attest to. The 2-mega pixel camera is below par these days and there was some clearly noticeable lag when navigating that makes the screen seem more like the less responsive resistive type than what is actually is - capacitive. It’s still perfectly finger-friendly though, and those who haven’t used a wide variety of smartphones may not be turned off at all by the Genio’s lack of processing brawn.

What will prove the real test for the Corby Genio is exactly how much it ends up costing in real terms. Next to phones like the HTC Hero and iPhone, it just doesn’t make sense, colour backplates or no. But at Rs 9,600 it could well prove a popular choice.

With a decent design and access to a similar range of services to those seen in top-end smartphones, the last few metres of that smartphone divide seem to be disappearing.