Samsung S5620 Monte disadvantages

Introduction

Affordable touch phones are all over the place so the Samsung S5620 Monte will have to win the old fashioned way – by giving more and better features. Done deal: with full-suit connectivity, the Monte aims to deliver great touch experience and social networking features plus some distinguishable styling.

The Samsung S5620 Monte has both 3G with HSDPA and Wi-Fi for browsing and data, and a built-in GPS receiver for location services. The Monte has a capable web browser (with Flash support) and a decently sized 3” screen. The GPS can also transform the Monte into a proper SatNav unit thanks to the free NaviExpert app. However, the free license is available for phones sold in the Czech Republic.

For the impatient readers, here’s a rundown of the Samsung S5620 specs – the good and bad of it.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/EDGE, UMTS 900/2100, HSDPA 3.6 Mbps
• 3" capacitive TFT touchscreen of WQVGA resolution, 256K colors
• TouchWiz 2.0 Plus user interface with multitasking support
• 200 MB onboard storage, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
• 3 megapixel camera with smile detection, QVGA video @ 15fps
• Secondary video-call camera
• Wi-Fi connectivity (b/g)
• GPS receiver with A-GPS; Free GPS navigation with NAVTEQ maps
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
• microUSB slot (with charging support)
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• DNSe sound enhancements
• Find Music recognition service
• FM radio with RDS
• Office document viewer
• Smart unlock
• Social networking integration with direct file uploads
• Accelerometer for auto screen rotate, turn to mute

Main disadvantages

• Free GPS navigation is for Czech Montes only
• No on-screen QWERTY keyboard
• Flash in browser eats too much RAM, can’t play YouTube videos
• No games preinstalled
• Task manager cannot be used for switching between apps

If you’ve read our preview you’d know the S5620 Monte was orange-on-grey back then. Samsung have obviously changed their mind since and put a tux on the Monte – it’s now grey on black – a bit more conservative.

The preview was written before the Samsung Bada OS came about but now that we’ve played with it too, we can do a better comparison. The Monte is a feature phone and Bada is a smart platform but in the end they both share the TouchWiz DNA. What that means is that the interface of both is pretty similarly – at least graphically.

So, we have the Samsung S5620 Monte back for a proper check-up. See what has changed and what stayed the same in hardware on the next page.