Samsung i780 review

Office and more

Samsung i780 offers all the standard stuff from the core WM6 professional OS plus some extra applications preinstalled by Samsung.

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are easily syncable with MS Outlook. The Calendar is improved in comparison to the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use it for business purposes only.

The Calendar offers daily, weekly, monthly and yearly view

The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder and Calculator go without saying.

The To-Do list • some of the options of a handwritten note

The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock easily accessible. Instead, it's buried deep down in the Settings menu. Alongside, you will also find the dual-zone clock.

The Alarm clock • the dual zone clock

Samsung obviously deemed waking up on-time important and decided to preinstall an additional Alarm application - which is welcome since Alarm management in Windows Mobiles is way too basic. With much more options and greater functionality, it easily sidelines the classic Alarm clock. Configurable wake up tones, snooze time, name, activation and five repeat modes are among the available options.

The proprietary Alarm application offers more options

Among the other WM core applications is the Office Mobile package featuring support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files.

Opening an Excel document • reading a Word document

Another application is the rather handy Search software, capable of searching throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in the places you need.

A search for "De" returns contact entries plus some other files • filtering your search

The Smart Converter effortlessly handles length, weight, volume, area and temperature.

The Smart Converter

Fully-equipped for Podcasting with CalliaReader RSS, Samsung i780 allows you to receive your favorite RSS feeds of the latest news, blog updates, favorite shows, etc.

The CalliaReader RSS

Another akin add-on is the CalliaPlayer. It allows you to view podcast channels, download episodes through the channels you have subscribed to and edit or save files for viewing. Internet connection is required.

Callia Player

"...Samsung i780 is a neat and stylish PocketPC, which offers friendly handling and compact design given its full QWERTY keyboard and large display. Its proven PocketPC capabilities, rich application package and a handful of innovations will surely attract Windows Mobile users. ..."

The Task Manager is a friendly and convenient Samsung application, which can be launched either from the menu or simply by pressing the OK key next to the touchpad. When active, it resides at the bottom of the screen displaying the currently running applications. The left soft key closes the selected application, while the right soft key terminates all running apps.

The Task manager

GPS Navigation

While most of the applications in our Samsung i780 worked like a charm, the GPS navigation didn't roll at all. For 2 hours of testing we didn't get a satellite lock even though the phone was attempting contact all the time. The GPS hardware key didn't respond either. We assume the GPS functionality, along with the A-GPS support, in our test unit was either disabled or malfunctioned. As there was no preinstalled GPS software we tried running Google Maps without it and we were more than pleased with the performance.

Zooming in to street level detail with the hybrid view of Google Maps

Upon some research, we managed to come across a demonstration at video.google.com of GPS working properly in Samsung i780. Check out a couple of screenshots from the video illustrating this feature.

Screenshots of working GPS receiver in Samsung i780

Final words

Samsung i780 is a neat and stylish PocketPC, which offers friendly handling and compact design given its full QWERTY keyboard and large display. Its proven PocketPC capabilities, rich application package and a handful of innovations will surely attract Windows Mobile users.

In the several days of testing Samsung i780 proved to be a worthy reinforcement to the company's QWERTY smart portfolio. We are quite pleased with the improvements Samsung i780 brings to the i series.

It however managed to lose all of our affection with its poor compatibility with third party applications developed for 4:3 aspect ratio screens. After all, the huge availability of native third-party applications is one of the Windows Mobile best selling points. With Samsung i780 however it has the potential of becoming a huge source of frustration thanks to the constant game of trial-and-error.

We certainly hope that this might be a unit-specific problem (although we highly doubt it), as with all other things considered, Samsung i780 is a wonderful high-end QWERTY PocketPC, that had the potential of becoming a bestseller among smart devices.