If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more. He was broadly in favour of that handset, but had some reservations and I feel the same about the Tri-band clamshell D The D is an ultra slim clamshell handset.
It is mm tall, 54mm wide a mere 9. Samsung then, has produced a handset which is a shade taller and wider than the V3 but a whole 4mm thinner as well as a few grammes lighter. Holding the closed D in the hand I had rather mixed feelings about it. Its blackness, punctuated only by blue lighting emanating from the small 96 x 16 pixel OLED LCD front mounted screen, which is mounted high on the front casing, certainly looks sleek and impressive and I like the grid of dots that subtly pattern and gives texture to the front of the handset.
However, although there is no doubting that the D is both thin and light, as someone with smallish hands for me its width and height made it feel chunky — moreso, in a strange way than some candybar handsets. Looking around the edges of the D the left side sports the smallest volume buttons I have ever seen and also a tiny covered slot for the connector shared by the proprietary headset and mains power adaptor.
These are located in the base section of the clam, which is a mere 5mm thick at this point. The volume buttons are barely more than a single millimetre thick. This slot too is covered. Samsung has built notches into the casing so you can open the covers but if you are a fingernail biter I suspect you are going to have serious trouble.
There are no more buttons, ports or connectors, which makes this handset minimalist in design, and adds to its sleek appearance. Opening the clamshell up was a bit of a nuisance and I found it difficult to do this one handed purely because of its overall width. With the clamshell opened I found things that delighted and repelled in equal measure. Firstly, naturally enough the D gains a lot of height when opened — it is nearly mm tall, and I found it large for holding to the ear. The main screen though, is absolutely gorgeous.
It is x pixels and , colours, so there is nothing spectacular there, but its default poppy wallpaper shines out from its black surround wonderfully well. The keypad, too, at first glance, looks good.
It takes up almost all the available width and much of the available height and its keys are large. Samsung has built a fair bit of software into the D The company clearly thinks some business users might go for it having included the excellent Picsel viewer for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and various image format documents. In general I found this software package to be pretty good and notwithstanding my key-tapping problem I like the way the menu system works.
Samsung has used it before. Basically, you choose an application from the icon based grid. For settings within applications you get a range of numbered options, pick one and the next tier of options appears overlayed onto this. Of course there is a camera. With no shortcut button on the phone casing you can only turn the camera on via the handset menu and the task requires two key presses.
The camera lacks a flash or self portrait mirror, but you can manually change the ISO setting between , and as well as have it and the white balance on automatic. As ever I chose the automatic settings for the test shots. My standard reference shot is a multicoloured tray, taken indoors with ordinary household overhead lighting. The vibrant pink and bright white in this photo are both well reproduced. Battery life was reasonably good. Aside from its slimness, the handset has many other intriguing design flourishes.
Finished in magnesium, the D is a wonderfully tactile mobile. It's lightweight but doesn't feel insubstantial. The clamshell hinge seems durable, and the general feel is similar to Motorola's all-conquering RAZR. However, though it's a clamshell the D can't be flipped open with as much ease as some of its competitors.
We had to prise the phone open with two hands to catch a call or to access the menu. The exterior of the D is all minimalist pleasure; there seems to be so little going on. Look closely, though, and you'll find an OLED display 96x16 , which provides time, date, battery capacity and signal strength information. It's a fixed lens, so there's no rotating when you open up the clamshell. Keen observers will also spot that there's no flash unit because the handset doesn't feature one.
It does, however, feature plenty of camera and camcorder functions. Two responsive volume keys sit on the left side of the handset, while just a bit further along from them you'll discover the headphone jack. Samsung has provided a set of in-ear headphones as part of the sales package. The handset has an 80MB internal memory, which can be expanded using microSD memory cards.
You'll find the slot for the removable media on the right side of the handset, though there's no card supplied. Once you've flipped out the D, it's far more overt that there's plenty going on. The bright and vibrant 2. You won't feel lost navigating around the handset's features - which considering how many are on offer can only be a good thing. Unlike with the D, Samsung has chosen a touch control keypad for the D This means there are no raised keys, and that might fox a few users in the early days of having the phone.
We had difficulty with text messaging at the start of our test. In time, though, the keypad proved to be responsive, and we actually preferred its wide spacing by the conclusion of the test. Among its many features, this tri-band model offers the aforementioned 2-megapixel camera and a decent multi-format music player.
The camera provides users with a maximum resolution of 1,x1, on their still images there are an additional six lower resolution settings and access to features such as a 4x digital zoom, special effects, frames and exposure controls. There's even a straightforward image editor for making tweaks and changes to your stills.
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