In a nutshell: The F300 is a music phone with an experimental “flipper” design. In our opinion the flipper design is a flawed concept and causes many problems with no real benefits. One to avoid!
Samsung call the design of the F300 a “flipper” design, which makes it sound quite cute, like it’s a cuddly dolphin or something. The idea is that on one side you have a “normal” phone with a small screen, keypad and navigation key, and on the other side you have a big screen and a minimalist user interface, which is intended for all of the multimedia functions. We have to admit that we’re sceptical about the benefits of this design. What are the benefits exactly? We can’t think of any right now, but maybe we’ll have found some by the end of this review.
Certainly Samsung have created a very compact and lightweight phone, weighing just 77g and slimmed down to just 9.4 mm in thickness. But the U600 slide phone gets very close to that and the conventionally-designed U100 is even smaller and lighter.
Now, we have a problem – which side of the phone to review first? We’ve got to admit that in 6 years of reviewing mobiles, this is the first time that this question has ever arisen. Let’s start with the keypad side (that’s the side for making phone calls.) What we have here is a very compact phone with a conventional keypad and a nice 5-way navigation key. The screen is small, so the keypad can fill most of the space available, making it very easy to use (hey – that’s a benefit of this flipper design, isn’t it? Things are looking up!) Yet because the screen is so small, it can display just two lines of text, making the user interface cramped and clumsy. The construction of the phone is solid and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to break, unless you treat it really badly. Not much more to say about this side really – it makes phone calls – so lets flip the phone over and examine the other side.
The multimedia side of the phone looks like a slide phone with the slide closed. But with a really big navigation key. Hey, it is big! It’s touch sensitive too, so we see a problem here. Touch-sensitive keys are great in iPods, but have a sad history when used in mobile phones. Samsung have done this before with the E900 and U600, both of which use touch-sensitive keys and received plenty of criticism from users. Samsung haven’t learned their lesson here. And another thing – the touch-sensitive button alone isn’t enough to access all the menu functions, so you have to use the side-mounted volume control too. It feels like a clumsy solution.
Read full article: Samsung F300 review
