Samsung S7350 Ultra s review: Sliding into place

The Samsung S7350 Ultra s may as well be your next phone. Oh well, maybe no one will know but if you can live with that, you'll get to enjoy a solid and attractive slider with a nice screen, premium data speeds and high-end media. Following in the wake of the standard-setting Soul, the Samsung S7350 Ultra s adds a larger and more vivid screen, improved video recording and GPS to sweeten the deal. Or more likely - to be in step with its time.

The tremendous Soul footprint in the Samsung portfolio is not the point here. We're watching the new midrange take shape. Less prominent but more capable than yesterday's high-end seems to be the way it's going. Is it a fair trade - we guess we're about to see.

Samsung S7350 Ultra s official photos

Key features

• Quad-band GSM and dual-band (900/2100 MHz) UMTS with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) support
• Large 2.6" 16M-color TFT display of WQVGA(400x240) resolution
• 12.6mm thick
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, face and smile detection, Wide Dynamic Range and geotagging
• D1 video at 30 fps and slow-motion video recording
• Built-in GPS with A-GPS support
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
• Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP
• microUSB v2.0, charging through USB
• Accelerometer sensor
• DivX and XviD support
• Basic Java multitasking
• Office document viewer
• Smart dialing

Main disadvantages

• No full-featured voice-guided navigation software
• Inadequate flash performance
• Video recording quality isn't up to scratch (although the framerate is pretty good)
• Initial memory card initialization is quite slow

Back in February when we first previewed the Samsung S7350 Ultra s, the future looked bright for this stylish slider. We're now about to embark on a full review to see how it all worked out. Since the early stages of its development, the Ultra s (also known as UltraSlide) has seen a number of changes. We guess we need to draw the line and look at the finished piece.

Samsung S7350 live photos

All right, the journey ahead of us may not hold a whole lot of promise for discovery but we hope we get some mileage out of it for fun and action. We're back right after this jump and we'll slide it up, spin it off and watch it do its thing. Let's see how friendly, reliable and skilled this Ultra slider is.