Samsung F400

Subscribe via: RSS EMAIL

The Samsung F400 is an outstanding music phone. Its novel dual-slide design enables the Bang & Olufsen external speakers to blast out your music, and the iPod-like MusicWheel is an excellent way of controlling the music player. You can plug in your own headphones with the 3.5mm jack for the best possible music experience. Plus, with a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus, 3G HSDPA, Bluetooth, and a microSD memory card slot, there’s no need to make compromises with this phone. Did we mention the outstanding battery life?
The Samsung F400 is a dual slider phone. Slide it up to access the keypad, just like a conventional slide phone. Slide it down to reveal an external speaker located at the top of the phone (see picture on the right.) Its obvious that the F400 is intended as a music phone, and it really does deliver on its promise.

The music capabilities of the F400 are truly outstanding. The external stereo speakers add significantly to the volume, and the Bang & Olufsen ICEpower technology means that audio quality is 100%. The Smart Bass feature pumps out extra bass too. Audio quality is superb both when using the external speakers, or through headphones, and with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack you can use any set of headphones that you choose - a feature that’s surprisingly rare amongst other mobiles. The music player supports all common digital formats, including MP3 and WMA, and also supports OMA Digital Rights Management 1.0. You can set an MP3 track as a ringtone, or use 72-voice MIDI ringtones. As you’d expect, an FM radio is built in too.

The music controls are excellent too, with an iPod-like MusicWheel and a music hotkey. Using these controls you can easily access the music player with the slide closed and just the external speakers showing at the top. The F400 also comes with a music recognition feature similar to Sony Ericsson’s TrackID™ - find out the track and artist information by recording part of any song.

The F400 is a compact phone, although not superslim, and fits snugly into the hand. The keypad slides open smoothly and the keys shouldn’t cause any problems, as they are nicely sized with positive feedback. One advantage of not being superslim is that a larger capacity battery can be fitted inside, and in fact the F400 has outstandingly good battery life, which is very useful in a phone that doubles as a music player!

The phone is 3G and supports fast music downloads via HSDPA 3.6 Mbps. It also supports full Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity. SMS and MMS messaging are available, as well as email. A handy document viewer is installed for viewing attachments.

The camera is a good mid-ranger with 3 megapixels, autofocus and an LED flash. The camera can also record video in MPEG4 or 3GPP formats, and there’s a second camera for video calling too. The display is typical for this kind of phone, with a standard resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and 262k colours.

There’s just one thing that niggles us about the F400, and that’s the measly 20 Mbytes of internal memory. However, you can add a microSD card up to 8 Gbytes for storing up to 2,000 MP3 tracks, so this is something that we are prepared to live with. We rate the phone 9 out of 10.

Features of the Samsung F400 include: