Samsung U900 Soul review - Honest Samsung U900 soul reviews

Having been tagged as the ‘flagship product’ of Samsung for the year 2008, SGH-U900 AKA ‘Soul’ has stirred up quite a ruckus all over Barcelona where the GSMA Global Congress took place. With dual-screen, 5 megapixel camera, music player, 100 MB internal memory with an additional slot to support a 6GB memory card, a really, really cool navigation touchpad or the ‘magic touch’ and an all-out marketing, who wouldn’t create a commotion?

All of these features plus a lot more personal organizer functions all packed in a slim slider with specs of 105 X 50 X 13 mm. Now, the question is, was such a commotion brought about by elated onlookers or an angry mob? We’ll get to the answer after we’ve entered deep into SGH-U900, deep into the Soul.

Spirit Of ULtra – That’s SOUL for you. A wee bit corny but hey, the marketing team is doing their best to promote the said mobile phone, right? Plus it’s better than digits like 1234 or 9876. This has personality written all over it.

In it’s façade, the Soul looks stylishly slim with its metal construction, glossy surface and, of course, its sliding factor. At the back there’s a built in camera boasting elements like image stabilization and face detection. Being familiar with Samsung’s exceptional digital cameras, it’s a safe bet that the imaging in the SGH-U900 will be up to par.

With regards to music, the Soul has an mp3 player and an FM radio. One may say, oh ok, that’s common these days, but this mobile phone has a power amplifier created by the lovely people of Bang & Olufsen. Furthermore, music downloading would be easier, the Soul possesses a 3G HSDPA with speeds reaching 7.2 Mbps.

So far so good, eh?  But here is the best part, the 2 screen navigation touchpad or the ‘magic touch.’ You have the display screen above and the touch screen navigation right below it. The latter has real active display that allows the phone to exhibit various button or key icons in sync with the current application in use. For example, you’re in the main menu, the buttons you’ll see are only those of the main menu. The same applies when you’re on camera mode, the display icons will reflect only camera-related controls. In addition, when you toggle a particular button, you’ll feel a bit of vibration in your fingertips so you’ll know if you’ve actually pressed an icon.

These are the salient points of SGH-U900 AKA ‘Soul’ that made the onlookers take notice. However, most of the features are neither original nor that commanding in the mobile phone industry. The ruckus that was heard probably came from a few locals looking for Muscat or Retsina. To be honest, I really don’t know how the commotion started; I was too preoccupied admiring the Soul’s ‘magic touch.’