Samsung E2120 deals & review
What could be cooler than having a phone named The Guru? The Samsung E2120, aka the Samsung Guru, is a pocket-friendly budget handset that goes back to basics with style and finesse. A camera with fixed focus and basic recording, alongside FM radio, is about the height of this phone’s hardware.
Nevertheless, if you simply make calls and send texts, what more could you need? This model comes in fashionable black, black, and, er, black.
Released in September 2009, the Samsung E2120 is also known as the Samsung 2120 Guru and the 2120B with Bluetooth. It is an entry level budget mobile phone that has some of the features you can expect from a music and camera phone but at their most basic levels.
The Design
The phone sports a candybar form factor that comes only in black. The Samsung E2120 measures 104.4 x 45 x 14.6 mm and weighs a pocket-friendly 74g. Like any budget handset at this time, it has a smallish display featuring a squared 1.5 inch CSTN screen with 128 x 128 resolution and 75k color support.
Specifications
The Samsung E2120 is a dual band GSM (900/ 1800) with class 10 GPRS data speeds of up go 48 Kbps and no EDGE speeds. That’s equivalent to dial-up modem speeds so while a web browser is preloaded for use with a GPRS data plan, don’t expect fast surfing experience. As expected, it has no WiFi but local data connectivity gets a miniUSB 2,0 for wired data synching and charging. The 2120B model gets Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP.
There’s a camera with VGA resolution and a fixed focus and basic video recording which is not specified but don’t expect it to go beyond QCIF resolution at 15fps. It takes a nod to an entertainment phone as well as it has a stereo FM radio with RDS. It even has it own integrated antenna so you don’t have to connect its proprietary earphone to act as an antenna.
Yes, it’s proprietary as the handset does not have a 3.5mm headphone jack. For the 2120B, it comes with A2DP profile support for wireless stereo earphones. There’s also a media player for MP3 and AAC video files and H.263 video files.
Its onboard memory is almost non-existent at 9 MB and certainly useless for mobile MP3 listening. Good thing it comes with a microSD external memory expandability for up to 2GB – good enough for about a hundred medium bitrate MP3 files to keep you entertained on the road. What stands out on this budget handset is its talk time of 10 hours and standby time of 560 hours from its 1,000 mAh li-ion battery when fully charged.
Considerations
When you have a handset that can’t allow decent speeds for online surfing, it really makes no sense to have an HTML browser. But no matter, the preloaded apps is often something that’s thrown in for free in case the user wants to surf on a GPRS data plan.
Verdict
For a budget phone with very basic features, the Samsung W2120 does the job as a basic communications tool on the road. It lets you call and text to your heart’s content with its generous 10 hours of talk time. It can also make you busy while waiting for anything with games like Sudoku, Super Jewel Quest, Cricket and Carrom or listen to music if you don’t mind using its proprietary earphone. But at its price point, the competition is quite fierce from Nokia, Alcatel and LG.
