Samsung E210: Call of the clamshell

The savvy phone packs all standard features at an unbelievable price

The first thing you notice about the Samsung E210 is its sheen. Built in metallic finish plastic, a smart line of metal runs on the side, accentuating its clamshell design. The near perfect flat upper surface is breached only once, for the sturdy 1.3-megapixel camera.

The other surfaces are smooth curves, with the requisite recesses for volume keys, a slot for a micro SD card, a charger and earphone jack, and the mandatory hot key for clicking pictures. A tiny screen is built neatly on the top surface and displays time, network range and every phone call or message that breaks your admiring reverie of the phone.

One flick opens the clamshell to reveal the true pearl. The E210 has a lively two-inch screen that gives a sharp 65,000-colour display, making clicking pictures and setting them up as wall-papers an exciting experience. Samsung has stuck to its standard keypad arrangement by giving two hot keys for picking and cancelling phone calls and another two to select options from the menu. Apart from these, the circular four-way navigation key and the central selection key (cheekily called ‘OK’) give satisfactory responses, making simple tasks like dialling and the complex ones like speed messaging extremely easy.

Unlike its predecessors, the E210 displays raw speed as you move through menus, click pictures, text SMS or listen to music, with non-existent loading time for each application. Surprising, considering the number of applications that have been built into it.

The E210 is basically a multimedia phone. The 1.3-megapixel camera has a host of options that range from zoom to exposure setting, and gives results that are far ahead of comparable competitors. The camera also has decent video recorder, which catches enough frames to remove jerky motions. Even the music player, though standard, has good quality response and can handle MP3s, WMA files and ACC formats with the flurry of a pro. Besides the stored music, you can savour it through the FM tuner, and there’s the voice recorder for taking notes.

Still, the phone lacks connectivity. Though the GPRS connection delivers adequate speed for surfing and checking mail, the USB and Bluetooth are older versions, lacking speed and versatility. The is made up for by the sheer space the E210 provides for normal communication like phone numbers (1,000 with details) and SMS storage (200). Even the micro SD slot can be fitted with a 2 GB card, enhancing the number of songs, videos and pictures that you can store. If that’s not enough, the price is a sure lure. The E210 delivers all this in Rs 6,899, combining all functions of the multimedia world at the price of its black-and-white monophonic predecessors.