My new Samsung E530 reviewed

Okay, it was new in July when I wrote most of this post but I could never be bothered to finish it until now.

I like it! :) It's cute and it has a half-decent 1 megapixel camera, so I can still take photos even when I'm not carrying a bag big enough for my camera. I won't bore you with a description of the features available, just describe how they feel in a practical sense. For a thorough description of features, click here for Mobile-review.com's review.

Text messaging

The T9 dictionary is very handy, but for some obscure reason my phone has randomly reverted to German three or four times, which is quite annoying. I'm used to Nokia phones which are very intuitive but this phone has some nice texting features - holding down the # key brings up a menu of symbols, displayed nine to a page each with a number next to them so you can select the symbol you want instantly. Entering ".." automatically changes to a smiley ":)" which would be a good feature if I didn't use ellipses... They automatically get switched to .:) which isn't quite the same meaning - it should replace " .. " (including spaces) with a smiley instead.
After a few months of use, I do find it very annoying that it doesn't save the last input setting. So even though I always use the T9 dictionary with automated sentence capitalisation, whenever I start a new message I have to spend an extra couple of seconds changing the input from ABAB to T9Ab. Grr...

Camera

It's not bad - I have a half-decent shot of a warehouse skeleton, which looks a bit like a 50s picture postcard to me. Don't be fooled by the full-screen option for the viewfinder mode! It sounds great coz otherwise your viewfinder is only half the screen area but all it does is crop the sides to show you the middle half of the photo, which makes framing impossible! I don't know whose bizarre idea that was but it makes no sense at all! It would have been a better idea to rotate the image display for full-screen view since the screen is portrait when held as a phone and the photos are landscape ratio. But never mind. The "standard ratio" image image display is good enough to frame the photo properly, which I guess is all you really need. It was a nice idea that was just badly implemented.
A minor gripe - you can't resize images once they're taken - O2 have a size limit on their MMS so I have to keep changing the camera settings depending on whether I'm taking a photo for my photoblog or sending to a friend.

Sounds

Firstly... this phone is absolutely riddled with mad noises for every little thing you do. The first thing was hunt for the sound options so I could turn off the bleeping every time I opened a folder, closed an option, changed a setting, etc. Once they're off it's pretty handy to browse through the interface although the volume is very loud when the phone is open, so please don't start browsing your ringtones on the train. I think there's only the one speaker, so it has to be loud to be heard when the clamshell is closed.
For messages you can't set it to vibrate and beep! Very annoying because with it in my bag or pocket, I rarely hear the tone and in my house I can't hear the buzz. It's not easy to switch from one profile to the other, either. Ringtones are your typically annoying mad jingly tunes but the Samsung Mobile website has a handy plain RingRing option that you can download through WAP (Basic Ring 2). Also, they sent me a voucher for a free flight to select cities in Europe, which was nice :) You can use an MP3 as the ringtone as well, so it's easy enough to pick whatever you want.
Voice clarity is pretty good.

Other stuff (aka I'm bored of looking up features on my phone)

• Looks cute and feels nice :)
• Bluetooth is good although I haven't figured out how to synch/transfer messages to my PC yet. Samsung Mobile provides a bunch of software on their website but no instructions as to what it's supposed to do.
  
• Comes with some absolutely terrible Java games.
• Lifestyle options are okay but not hugely useful. I've tried the shopping list feature a few times but since the price of my shopping is wildly variable depending on whether I'm feeling energetic enough to fight through Asda or not, it doesn't really help me plan my budget any. Plus, I have no idea how much anything costs since supermarkets here are constantly "rolling back prices" (and quitely raising prices elsewhere). The display is also too small for it to be very helpful, only showing three items at a time.
• The biorhythm thing is mildly entertaining if you believe in that sort of thing. Give you a handy excuse when you're feeling lazy or thick, anyway :)
• "Pink calendar" might be useful if I was planning on getting pregnant any time soon, or predict periods. But I'm on Depo Provera. So not useful. (It only shows last month and next month, which isn't great either. I have some idea when my next one is. Will I have it on my birthday? That would be a useful thing ot know three months prior. No point in booking a beach holiday if you're going to bleed all through it)
  
• The included earphones are RUBBISH. They keep falling out, which is just annoying when I'm trying to exercise.
• Alarm has two basic alarm settings that can be either once or every day and a morning setting that you can set for every day, weekdays only, every day but sunday and once only. Nice feature.
  

That's it. Overall, probably 4 out of 5 for a phone - looks pretty, sounds great, good memory size, dubious text interface (buttons feel a bit weird), dodgy camera display but decent on-the-go photos when in broad daylight. The low-res photo display when someone calls is quite good as well - faces are totally recognisable. Wouldn't recommend if you want your phone to be an all-singing all-dancing PDA substitute, or if you're a serious T9/predictive-texter (i.e. 10+ messages a day) but there are some useful features there.