Samsung E530 (SGH-E530)

Discontinued
24th June 2005

The Samsung E530 is a surprisingly powerful little handset - surprising because the "E530" model number makes it sound a bit basic - however, the SGH-E530 is a handset that's almost as powerful as the class-leading E720, but with a much more "girlie" design.

In our opinion, this is one of the best looking phones on the market. The outside of the handset is beautifully curved when closed, and the E530 is nominally available in a variety of different colours (pink, orange, white, purple and blue for example). You can probably tell that we like the SGH-E530 because we've plastered so many photographs of it on this page.

It's not just a pretty phone though - we've seen handsets in the past that look great but are a little basic underneath. But, the E530 comes with a range of impressive features.

The primary display is a 176x220 pixel unit in 262,000 colours with a smaller external colour display. There's a one megapixel digital camera (with video capture and flash), plus 89Mb of internal memory, MP3 and video playback support and Bluetooth.

The SGH-E530 also comes with an email client, WAP 2.0 browser, Java, a calorie counter and other "life applications" and of course polyphonic ringtones.

There's very little difference between this handset and the E720, except the E720's design is a little more "masculine" than the more feminine lines of the E530.

This is a very lightweight handset too - at just 85 grams, and 86x43x26mm in size. Talktime is up to 5.5 hours with around 8 days standby time.

It's difficult to find anything wrong with the E530, but it does have a few flaws. Firstly, it's only a dual band GSM 900/1800 handset which practically rules it out of the US market. And, like the E720, the E530 lacks removable memory - and although 80Mb of memory is available for multimedia clips, in our experience that's only about one and a half albums worth of high-quality MP3s.

Did we mention that this is a very pretty phone? I think we did, but in our view the SGH-E530 is easily up with the Motorola RAZR and PEBL handsets, plus it has a better technical specification than either of them.

The Samsung SGH-E530 is available now in some European countries (at the moment we believe it to be the UK, Netherlands, Spain, Russia plus others) and in Asia Pacific, priced at around €350 / £250 for a SIM free handset.

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