Product Reviews

Many people prefer clamshell phones to soap-bar handsets due to their pocket-friendly size and concealed keypad. Samsung's D900 is just as slim as the clamshell Motorola RAZR, but it does things a little bit differently.

A ridge under the D900s screen makes it easy to slide the phone open and shut with your thumb. Opening and closing the device both answers and hangs up, but you can still make calls with the slide closed if you manually unlock the keypad. The main shortcut keys are well spaced if a little bit flimsy, but as the ridge obstructs the top of the directional keypad, navigating up through menus can be fiddly at times.

The handset has an excellent display, with a high 240 x 320 resolution for its size. The standby screen's photo also changes depending on the time of day, and dialling a number gives you an impressive animation

The D900 is generally a very easy phone to operate. You can set the main menu to display a list with sub-lists or a grid of icons, and while we found the list view confusing, changing to icons made things clearer. Unfortunately, the device suffers from the same texting problem as other recent Samsung phones in that you can't edit a word you've already typed, so you have to delete it instead. This is very annoying.

You certainly couldn't say that the D900 is light on features. Samsung's comprehensive PC Studio software allows you to manage your messages and synchronise your contacts and calendar with Microsoft Outlook.

There's also a 3-megapixel camera, built-in image editor and music player, and a web browser. Pictures taken with the camera were a bit fuzzy though, and the LED flash is actually pretty rubbish, so you can forget trying to take night shots.

The Samsung D900's web browser is also fairly primitive and makes a right hash of formatting pages to fit the screen. If you want the internet on a mobile phone you're much better off buying a proper smartphone.

Samsung D900 user guides, reviews, FAQs and downloads at Know Your Mobile