Samsung S5620 Monte review

Samsung India is on a roller coaster ride these days as the company is enjoying a growing popularity and brand recogntion among mobile phone users in India. The Samsung Star 3G and Samsung Corby have been the top selling devices by the company recently. And now we have another stunning device from the Korean manufacturer in the Indian market.

Samsung has come up with decent mid-range devices lately. The most popular being the Corby series devices which are offered in colourful jackets and sport trendy design to attract the young mobile users in India. The Corby also boasts of decent specs such as the front facing mini qwerty keyboard, a slide-out keyboard and good old fashioned touchscreen.

Well, Samsung has not exhausted all its resources on its successful Corby series devices. In fact, it has something more in store for the new Samsung Monte. It's slightly different handset at a budget range, though to be frank we don’t think it has anything that makes it stand out from the crowd.

The Samsung Monte S5620 is priced around Rs. 8,850 and for that amount Monte comes with superb specs and loads of features to complement the pricing aspect of the device.

Samsung Monte boasts of a capacitive touchscreen, HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi, accelerometer and Microsoft Exchange Activesync support, which almost sounds too good to miss. But, is the device really as good as it sounds on the paper?

It certainly packs decent features. The few features that we really liked included the smart unlock system. The device presents a lock button on the right edge, and you can simply unlock the handset by just tapping this. Additionally, you have the choice to unlock it by touching an icon on screen or by drawing out a letter on screen.

The next feature that caught our attention was its 3.5mm headset slot on the top of the chassi. It comes with a good quality in-ear buds that deliver plenty of volume. For music buffs, there's an FM radio, which is always a welcome addition, especially when you wish to listen some different songs than the stored ones.

But the device has its shortcomings too. For example, why on a handset which has support for work email via Microsoft Exchange, don’t you get a qwerty keyboard of any kind?

We were extremely satisfied with the display and screen offered on the device. The screen easily rotates between landscape and portrait modes as you turn it in your hands. However, whatever orientation you opt for you have a standard 1-9 keyboard with predictive text input on offer, which is a bit strange, annoying and time consuming.

Another question that you may ask is why on a capacitive touchscreen there no multitouch? While we kept on guessing about this, we move forward to its zoom in and out feature. Zooming in and out of Web pages and photos requires the use of a one-finger-zoom system in which you hold down on the screen then pull downwards to zoom out and upwards to zoom in.

Well, it works and work fine. But we found it a bit slow and unreliable mostly while Web browsing. That said, it is useful when you need to work one handed.

However, the option of pinch to zoom still would have been nice as well.

It's a small handset that comes with the dimensions of 108.8mm x 53.7mm x 12.4mm x 92g, and it snugs cosily into the pocket. It has a shiny black chassis that looks good initially but it does attract fingerprints, as does the screen.

The device packs 3-inch display. We found it a bit on the small side for multimedia related requirement, but at least even the small-handed should be able to manage one-handed use without too much of a stretch.

Other than that, Samsung has designed the Monte with its very familiar TouchWiz interface here. You can access three home screens onto which you can drop widgets.

But the interface has its own set of issues as well. Compared to the HTC and Apple devices, there’s only space for about three widgets per screen, which is pretty rubbish by anyone’s standards.

The cool feature associated with the Samsung Monte is its social networking aspect. There are tools for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo, which can carry some data. In order to do more, you’ll have to tap through to the full screen client to make proper use of these social networking tools – but at least get a smattering of info on a main screen.

Where TouchWiz usually relies on a slide-out sidebar from which you drag widgets onto the three home screens, in this instance there is a button located at the top of each of the three home screens, which calls up a menu of widgets at the bottom of the screen.

From this point, you can easily drag what you want onto the screen. Accordingly, if you want to remove a widget you call up the menu and drag a widget from the screen onto it.

Overall though, it’s not very difficult to use the sidebar system and, to be more honest, our main concern with widgets still remains: you have the option for about three only there!

Having said that, let's check the camera function of this device. Strictly speaking, if you are a photo freak, then Monte is not prescribed for you.
Although, the phone packs a 3.2-megapixels camera and it comes on strong with smile and face detection but, seriously lacks many advanced features. To name few, it lacks autofocus or any kind of flash, which means images seriously lack in sharpness – and shooting at night is, well, nightmarish.

Overall, the Samsung S5620 Monte is a decent device by all means. However, it just lacks the extra edge to set itself apart from the crowd. Furthermore, the Monte comes at a budget price and cool specs. Which isn't a bad combination in the super-competitive Indian mobile phone market.