Samsung Monte

Product: Samsung Monte
Website: www.samsungmobile.co.uk /samsungmonte
System Specifications: 3-inch touch screen, Samsung TouchWiz UI, 3.2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, AGPS, WiFi, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, miroSD, microUSB, Li-ion battery
Price: Dependent on contract, £110 Pay As You Go

SAMSUNG'S MONTE IS the firm's latest touch screen handset, aimed at social networkers on a tight budget.

The form factor of the Monte isn't a design of a typical touch screen mobile, as it has a slim, long screen and therefore overall body. The Samsung handset measures 108.8mm x 53.7mm x 12.4mm, which gives the Monte the look and feel of a candy bar style phone, but with no physical keypad.

It's almost as if Samsung has shrunk down one of its previous Jet models to produce a mini version of that handset in much the same way that Sony Ericsson has with the Xperia X10 for the Xperia X10 Mini, or Nokia has with the N97 for the N97 Mini. The Monte's case is entirely made of plastic and does feel a little on the cheap side, while getting noticeably grubby with fingerprints throughout the day. However, the candy bar format is a welcome change to existing touch screen mobile phone formats.

The accompanying display is a 3-inch 240x400 touch screen that is bright and responsive enough although longer than usually seen. Navigating around the phone using the touch screen was a decent enough experience without any major problems encountered.

The button residing in the middle underneath the screen acts as a return key to the last screen and that's about it. It's an odd setup and one that took some getting used to, where frequently we pressed the return key for the menu time and time again. The actual menu buttons for the various applications were at the base of the touch screen's window, which cuts down on the available room that application has to display its wares.

Running the handset is Samsung's own proprietary operating system which has never been named before, unlike the Wave with its new Samsung Bada OS. On top of this unnamed platform is the TouchWiz user interface, with a slightly modified theme to accommodate the smaller screen size. The INQ first saw 2.0 of TouchWiz on the Samsung Jet mobile last year, where ‘2.0 plus' has now been incorporated into this new handset and sits somewhere in between the Jet's UI and the Samsung Wave with its version 3 of the user interface.

The largest noticeable difference between the overlays on the operating systems is that the widget bar isn't down the left hand side of the three customisable home screens anymore. Instead there's just a widget activation button on the home screen that produces the housing area for all the widgets, which pops up from the bottom of the screen. There's a decent array of Java based widgets for a fairly budgeted phone residing here, although due to the screen size only one of them can comfortably fit on any home screen at any one time.

Included as applications and widgets are the expected array of Google and social networking software, which aren't as rich in resources as others we've used and seen before. The Facebook app and widget is a basic iteration of the mobile site, although now dated as compared to the Android's version and the newer mobile website version. It is also not as thoroughly integrated into the phone as it should have been, where images captured on the Monte's 3.2MP camera don't have a send option to Facebook or Twitter. The Twitter widget doesn't appear to have an application associated with it on the mobile that can be launched separately. This widget is also very limited, as it can only display 10 status updates on a single page whereas the mobile version of the website is a lot more useful with the same applying to Facebook as well.

There isn't a great app store for this propriety operating system, whereas budget Android devices boast a good application store and those handsets do excel very well in the touch screen sales. The Monte can run Java based applications, which really were the main items of software around once upon a time for mobiles - all thanks to being operating system independent.

One of the bugbears is the keyboard, or the virtual keypad that's provided with the Samsung Monte. Text input is only ever possible with a T9 keypad and not in any other way. Even when shifting to landscape mode, which the in-built accelerometer does automatically in web browsing, the same keypad is shown only off to the right-hand side. A good decent virtual Qwerty keyboard would have been a more preferable way of text entry, as the elongated screen lends itself to offering up a decent text entry experience if it were incorporated.

The Samsung Monte is only powered by a small 1000 mAh battery, the lowest rated battery we've seen on a mobile which just hammers home it's a budget model and Samsung has kept the hardware costs down to a minimum. In saying that, it's a good size and a much larger battery just wouldn't fit into the phone's small frame.

The Samsung Monte battery lasted the longest time we've seen on a mobile phone of late. It managed nine hours and six minutes worth of calls before dying, where receiving calls would be slightly over that time at around 10 hours, we estimate from experience. Throwing in social networking frequent updates, at around 30 minutes for Facebook and Twitter, would shave a small margin off that time which all means the phone would be good for a couple of days of real time use before recharging needs to happen.

In Short
Samsung's Monte is a decent enough budget touch screen handset, only in a candy bar format due to its elongated screen. What's missing is good social networking abilities and more fully integrated applications, which are seen on other budget handsets in features such as picture sending to a phone's address book. Seeing as this is supposedly aimed at the social networker we would have thought this would have been addressed properly, where the apps sadly let the Monte down. The actual Facebook and Twitter websites separately offer much more functionality than individual widgets do on the Monte.

The Good
Candy bar format touch screen mobile phone, battery life

The Bad
Cheap looking and feeling case, which gets obliterated with finger prints rapidly

The Ugly
Social networking integration leaves much to be desired

Bartender's Report
6/10