The S5620 Monte may sound like a silly device but is actually an excellent social networking phone, following much in the same vein as Samsung‘s earlier Genio phones. Like the Genio handsets, the Monte comes with bright and youthful colours and quick and easy access to popular social networking services such as Facebook and Bebo. The Monte does have one advantage over most of the Genio phones (except the Genio Pro) in that it has Wi-Fi support, meaning that you have even more opportunities to connect to your friends online.
Appearance and Screen quality
The Monte has a 3″ TFT display with a highly detailed WQVGA resolution (240 x 400). This combined with the 256k colours available means that the Monte offers a sharp and vibrant rendering of the TouchWiz interface that is a joy to navigate around. The Monte uses TouchWiz 2.0 Plus, which is the latest version of Samsung’s proprietary touchscreen OS and offers many enhancements over previous versions.
The screen itself operates on capacitive technology providing a higher degree of responsiveness. The resolution means that the Monte provides 16:9 aspect ratio making it ideal for watching widescreen videos. While you would normally use the Monte in portrait mode you can quickly turn the phone into landscape for watching videos thanks to the built in accelerometer.
The Monte is similar in appearance to the Genio phones, although slightly more angular. The phone is available in three vibrant colour schemes: Black and Orange, Black and Graphite, or White and Red.
Media & entertainment
The Monte’s media player will support all major music and video formats as well as having a stereo FM radio complete with RDS. The Monte also has a 3.5mm audio jack on the side which you can insert your own headphones into. The Monte has 227MB of internal space for you to store all your music and videos, and this can be upgraded to 16GB with microSD cards. You can also stream video content from online and there is a special YouTube app included.
While the 3.2 megapixel camera unfortunately does not come with a flash there are plenty of other great features included to make it worthwhile. There is smile and face detection and you can also shoot photos in panoramic mode as well as assigning GPS info to images with geo-tagging. The camera can also record QVGA video at 15fps and there is a secondary camera on the front of the Monte for video calling. The lack of flash may limit the usability of the camera to daylight conditions, which is somewhat of a shame.
The heavy social networking integration on the Monte means that you will be able to quickly upload pictures and videos to your favourite sites online to share with friends. The SNS integration means that there are special apps providing quick and easy access to sites like Facebook and Twitter, and you can have information from these services delivered to your phone homescreen. Furthermore, information from these websites can be pooled and attached to your contacts in your address book.
Connectivity
The Monte runs on the latest version of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. This will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used a touchscreen Samsung phone running their proprietary OS before, and is easy to pick up for people who haven’t. With brightly coloured icons and an easy to navigate design, the latest version of TouchWiz comes with many improvements.
The Monte is quad band GSM with 3G support provided by HSDPA. The Monte also comes packed with support for GPRS and EDGE, as well as microUSB and Bluetooth with A2DP. While the Monte fits into the same niche as the Genio phones most of those handsets such as the Genio QWERTY and Genio S3650 did not come with Wi-Fi support, and this is a clear advantage for the Monte.
Email and Messaging
The Monte comes with support for SMS and MMS as well as great support for instant messaging. The Monte uses Palringo instant messaging which can source your contacts from multiple instant messaging services including Windows Live (MSN), Google Talk, ICQ, AOL, Yahoo and many others.
The Monte is not just great for messaging and IM but also comes with fantastic email support with push email being employed. Push email means that you are notified on the Monte’s homescreen when a new email is received by your account and you do not have to guess when to check for new messages.
The Monte has been designed as a phone for social networkers and there are many great features included for this purpose. There are apps to integrate all the major social networks into the Monte, providing you with quick access to update your status or tweet your latest thoughts. You can link contacts in your phonebook to their respective social network accounts so that their SNS info can be displayed directly to your phonebook. There is excellent integration for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Bebo among others.
Summary
The Monte seems to be following in the footsteps of Samsung’s recent Genio (Corby) line of phones, with a fun and easy to use handset with heavy emphasis on social networking. The Monte has great connectivity on board, and particularly benefits from the inclusion of Wi-Fi which only the Genio Pro was fortunate enough to possess. Definitely one for the younger generation the Monte will certainly be a phone to consider if you spend a lot of your time online. Take a look at all the latest Samsung S5620 Monte Deals or read some Samsung S5620 Monte Reviews to find out more about this fantastic phone.
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