Samsung E620 (SGH-E620)

Available now
17th June 2005

The Samsung E620 was first announced at CeBIT a couple of months ago, but at the time there was very little detailed information on the handset. Now, the E620 has been officially unleased on the market, we can take a closer look at the technical specifications and distinctive features.

For all practical purposes, the Samsung SGH-E620 is a cut-down version of the excellent E720 handset. The E620 comes with a decent 176x220 pixel TFT display in 262,000 colours, a one megapixel digital camera, Bluetooth, and email client and web browser and still manages to weigh just 85 grams. It's an attractive handset too, with the smooth good looks of many other similar Samsung phones.

Samsung are going for Bluetooth in a big way recently, and the E620 is yet another Bluetooth-capable phone. One trick that the SGH-E620 has up its sleeve is "speaker independent" voice recognition, which in theory means that you can voice dial without have to record a voice tag first, and this will even work using a Bluetooth headset. However, we feel that voice training a mobile isn't the world's biggest chore, and we can't voice for the accuracy of the system (although Samsung say that it will work in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish at the moment, with a possible revision including Russian, Chinese and Korean in the future.

Strangely, the E620's casing comes with some sort of antibacterial coating. It's difficult to say if this will mean that your phone will be nice and healthy, or instead accidentally turn into the breeding ground for some super-bug. Put another way, bacteria evolve quickly and have a remarkable trick of becoming resistant to their local environment.

So - the SGH-E620 has a lot of good points, but it's important to understand that this isn't an E720 and there are some pretty severe limitations. The main problem is that the Samsung E620 only comes with 16Mb of memory for pictures, video clips and ringtones which is hardly enough for a phone with a megapixel camera. There's also no way to expand the onboard memory. Similarly, email storage space is limited to 3Mb. It is also an expensive phone at list price - Samsung are quoting an recommended unsubsidised price of €429 in Europe. Realistically though, the E620 should be priced closer to €300 - certainly cheaper than the more capable E720.

Of course, it doesn't take a genius to work out that the SGH-E620 also looks pretty much like an awful lot of other Samsungs. Again, the E620 doesn't compare well to the E720 in this respect at the E700 series of phones are at least distinctive in their design.

The Samsung SGH-E620 is currently available in some regions. Talktime is not bad at up to 5.5 hours with a maximum of 8 days standby time, and the E620 measures 89x45x24mm and weighs 85 grams.
 

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