The Samsung S5620 Monte - Smarter Than Many Smartphones

It used to be quite exciting talking about smartphones. What OS they use, what apps they have and what features to drool over can take the wind out of any discussion about mobile phones. But over the course of mobile phone evolution, the line drawn between a smartphone and a regular feature phone is now almost as meaningless as a penciled line on a piece of paper.

Except for the OS and its multitasking PC-like flexibility, a smartphone no longer enjoys any advantage. Take a look at the new Samsung S5620 Monte full-touchscreen handset recently announced just before the 2010 Mobile World Congress. With its features, and they are by no means ordinary, one would think it's a smartphone. It looks like one, it even acts like one. But it's just a feature phone.

Very Smart Dumbphone Features

Samsung ported its TouchWiz 2.0 UI on the RTOS (real-time OS) of the Monte giving it look and feel of a smartphone. Feature-wise, there's little to betray the fact that it's just a feature phone. Take a look.

• It's a 3G phone with dual band UMTS with HSDPA at 3.5 MBps as well as a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and standard microUSB 2.0 HS brings its local data connectivity at par with any upscale handset. It also has built-in A-GPS receiver with Google Maps 3.0 to give you the SatNav functionality in many smartphones. There's also Google Latitude that pinpoints your exactly location coordinates anywhere you go.
• A 3-inch Wide QVGA (240 x 400) with 256k colors used to be rare in feature phones but is now a common feature in many affordable touchscreen monoblocks. But it gets better with a capacitive touchscreen that few smartphones have. It has the usual gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing and a gesture-like turn-to-mute but no proximity sensors.
• A 3.2 megapixel fixed focus camera is fairly common even with midrange smartphones. It even features with smile detection, geo tagging from its GPS capability and a decent QVGA video recording at 15fps that many affordable smartphones have. This one has a front-facing CIF camera that is useful with your 3G video calls.
• The handset won't be complete with the expected multimedia experience it brings. It has the capable media players we've come to expected from a Samsung mobile phone, a stereo FM receiver with RDS and 3.5mm headphone jack. It gets the Samsung's own DNSe (Dynamic Natural Sound engine) that promises to bring a listening experience on the road with surround effects or a simple stereo widening.
• There's only 227 MB of internal memory storage with up to 1,000 photocall-enabled phone entries. But you get microSD expansion slot for up to 16 GB that's hot-swappable. There's a 960 mAh Li-Ion battery that can get you up to 9 hours of talk time and 770 hours of standby time.

As a nod to the social networking markets, the Samsung S5620 Monte has the SNS apps for integrating with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Its other built-in apps include push email with Emoze, instant messaging with Palringo and document viewers for PDF and MS Office files.