Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani

 

An average phone loaded with bling

 

 

 

OLED display has vibrant colors, comfortable full QWERTY keypad, DivX/XviD playback, 8 GB built-in memory

Too thick and bulky, design may not appeal to all, sluggish interface, poor display visibility under sunlight, poor quality video playback, no 3.5mm jack, expensive 

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani is one of those devices, which, after spending some time with it, makes you wonder, "What were they thinking?" Don't understand why? Allow me to explain.

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani is supposed to be a fashionable device with the Armani branding and all. Now, we are no strangers to such fashion focused devices and have had a fair share of them in our test labs. But unlike most of them, the Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani failed to make an impression on us.

It isn't particularly stylish, no matter which angle you look at it from. The phone, which is basically the Samsung OmniaPro underneath, was never supposed to be a stylish device. This is plainly obvious from its portly dimensions and heavy weight. It feels like what it actually is underneath, a full QWERTY smartphone designed for geeks and business users, not the fashion conscious. In fact the gold paint that Samsung has slapped on it makes it look a bit gaudy.

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani has a slide out QWERTY keypad, which we found to be pretty spacious and easy to use. The phones slides out straight, but after opening you can also tilt the display like the N97 and N97 mini. However, unlike those phones, the display on the Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani does not tilt automatically and has to be done manually. Also, we found the angle slightly steep after tilting but that is not much of a concern as the OLED display has good viewing angles.

Speaking of OLED displays, we found the picture quality of the display quite good. Unfortunately though, the 65k color limitation meant that there was a lot of color banding, which can be noticed immediately when you start the phone as the orange welcome screen of Windows Mobile 6.5 greets you. Like all OLED displays, the one on the Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani too displayed vibrant colors, good contrast and deep blacks indoors. However, outdoors the display washed out almost completely and was almost unreadable.

Another strange problem that we noticed with the display was that, although it looked fine most of the time, save for the minor color banding issue, while watching videos the display was terrible for some reason. There was a lot of noise in the videos and they had a weird green tint to them, and also lacked clarity and sharpness. This was a real dampener as the phone is capable of playing DivX and XviD files without any kind of encoding and you can just drop your standard definition videos directly onto the phone and they will be played back. There is also 8GB of internal memory to get you started and you can add more through microSD cards.

When it came to music though, the Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani disappointed by not having a 3.5mm headphone jack on the phone itself. Surely considering the titanic dimensions of the device, Samsung could have managed to fit it in somewhere. The loudspeaker, however, was quite decent. It was fairly loud and of good quality. An extra speaker on the phone would have made it even better though, especially for watching videos.

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, an ageing operating system, which by now is lying in its grave, waiting for Windows Phone 7 to arrive and throw soil on it. To cover up its age, however, Samsung has added their own skin on top of it, which mimics the UI of Samsung's feature phones like the Jet. You even get the widgets and everything on the home screen. Although all that is fine and definitely better than using the default interface of WinMo 6.5 (heck, anything is better than the default UI of WinMo 6.5), what kills the overall experience is the sluggishness of the UI. What's surprising is that this happens despite the phone's rather impressive hardware, an S3C6410 800MHz processor and graphics accelerator. We feel that although the hardware is fine for WinMo itself, the extra TouchWiz skin that Samsung has added on top is causing the slowdown and that it is not optimized correctly for the hardware (unlike HTC's Sense). The slow UI, coupled with the inherent sponginess of the resistive display makes the phone a chore to use.

For browsing the web, the Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani comes with the standard Internet Explorer and an older version of Opera Mobile. Both the browsers failed to impress us with their interface and performance, so we installed the latest Opera Mobile 10 on it, which thankfully worked well. The phone has support for Flash, which means you can view some of the content on the phone. Note that we mentioned some and not all, which means that certain Flash sites won't work on the device. Also, those that worked were often slow and sluggish, and pages with Flash content on them took ages to load and were a pain to navigate. Flash videos played on the device were also choppy and almost unwatchable.

This makes you realize that there was indeed some good logic in Apple deciding to leave out Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Mobile devices will still take time before you can use Flash content on them like you can on a PC. But by then it's likely that Flash will be replaced by HTML5 everywhere.

Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. The Camera interface is from Samsung's other touchscreen phones, which means it is pretty easy and well laid out. The image quality of the camera was a bit of a disappointment. We usually expect Samsung phones to have good image quality but the B7620 Giorgio Armani failed to meet our expectations. The images were noisy and had poor details. The colors were dull and although they looked fine on the phone's OLED displays, which boosts the colors up a bit, on the PC they fell flat on their face. Even the recorded videos, in 640 x 480 resolution were jerky and pixellated.
The Samsung B7620 has a 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery. In our testing the phone lasted for one day on a full charge, with a few calls, messages, web browsing on Wi-Fi and a couple of hour of music and video playback.

There isn't much good that we can say about the phone. The few plus points that it might have are completely overshadowed by its flaws. What's annoying is that at times the device is downright frustrating to use, which is not at all what we expect from a device costing Rs. 38,000.

What Samsung has done here is take an existing product, add a splash of golden paint and some fancy wallpapers and slap on the Giorgio Armani name and bumped up the price beyond what could be considered good value. In comparison the standard B7610 OmniaPRO, priced at Rs. 22,000, is much better value and has almost 95% features of the B7620 and even a 3.5mm headphone jack that B7620 lacks. The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani is a combination of terrible software, average hardware and exorbitant price. Avoid this one like plague, even if you are a big fan of Armani.