[Review] Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani, Lights n Sounds ON!
A handset with a distinct personality à la mode and let this go unnoticed. Irresistibly, if looks matter the most for you, this Samsung and Armani duo is very much a youthful make. No doubt, your attire along with Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani is a cynosure and your personality is sure to stand apart at the crowd.
Sony’s Walkman Series, Nokia’s Xpress Music phone, Motorola’s MOTOROKR … In line with these handsets, it is Samsung Armani partnership in this M7500. Typically style personified and a music-centered device with flashy lights, here is Samsung M7500 with Emporio Armani logo !
Pros: Good image quality, glossy light effects, Smart dial feature
Cons: Camera without flash, costly phone compared to the competitors
Peripheral Design
Front panel: hosts the earpiece, video-call camera and ambient light sensor. Below it is the 2.2″ display with a flatbed keypad.
Left: Has the microUSB slot (unlike proprietary ports) and a big Emporio Armani logo with LED stripes on either side that glow and flash in the same color as the logo when activated.
Right side hosts the three dedicated music controls, the volume rocker and the camera key ; sure with lighting
Top: 3.5 mm audio jack
Backlit with the logo again and hosts the 3MP camera with 2048×1536 pixel resolution. The camera key also accommodates the basic Task Manager – the so called application switch, which lets you quickly toggle between calling, texting, browsing and Java Apps.
OLED Display – The night effect symbolised!
The 2.2” QVGA OLED display with 256K colours is perfect in brightness and contrasts. By the way, the colours of the whole outlook of this handset take a top credit rather than the screen display thyself.
Has three vibrant lights to show off! – comes in theme style with red, blue and green. Sure, metallic colour that coheres with the discotheque mood!
Changing the active theme will always affect the external light colour but also light effect settings are adjustable to can change light colour independently. The theme colours are customizable enough to switch off the external glowing stripes and logos.
With display, Sunlight legibility alone is a down sider. Anyways, OLED displays give its optimum performance.
User Interface
The UI is typical Samsung style but the themes go perfectly with Armani Style. The main menu displays as either a V-shape or the more conventional 3×4 grid. The V-shaped main menu is a novelty for Samsung and we see it implemented here for the first time.
A nice touch is the basic task manager – the so called Application switch, which lets you quickly toggle between calling, texting, browsing and Java Apps. The Java apps section allows you to run several Java titles simultaneously.
As a music phone – How much does it live up to… !?
Featured with track-sorting filters, podcast section and 13 sound effect modes, the music feature was lively. Yet, the audio quality of Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani isn’t as impressive as hoped. Samsung handsets usually excel in music player capabilities. But this one still needs to live up to the mark.
The Samsung M7500 comes complete with an FM radio with RDS. The radio can run in the background. Additionally you can set a radio program as a wakeup alarm and also there’s an option to set a reminder for a broadcast that you don’t want to miss.
And again the down sider is that you need a the FM radio requires a headset connected to the microUSB port of the phone. The 3.5mm jack could not be used for listening to the FM radio.
Video Capabilities
The M7500 Emporio Armani video player does not offer plenty of features but it has the essentials – it plays MPEG4 and 3GP files. Other than that, you can fast-forward or rewind videos, and you can watch them fullscreen in landscape mode. You can also show or hide the controller panel in portrait mode, yet the features remain active throughout.
The Samsung M7500 shoots video in the so-called Camcorder mode. The user interface of the camcorder doesn’t differ from the one of the still camera except for some of the available options.
The camera uses the usual non-smartphone interface and follows the current trend of displaying settings with icons in a toolbar at the top of the screen, while options appear as drop-down menus. The settings are extensive and include picture size, shooting mode (single, smile shot, continuous, panorama, mosaic and frame shot), color effects (black and white, negative, sepia, etc.), white balance, and resolution setting. The camera can be used in landscape mode only.
Smile Shot is the only extra that sets the Emporio Armani phone apart from other 3 megapixel phone cameras by Samsung. The smile shot works in two steps. The first step requires you to press the shutter key all the way down and then frame the person you would like to take a photo of. Then the camera starts to track the face until the person smiles. Smile please J this feature is one heartening thing to look at, despite the down sides in audio / music capabilities.
Software Capabilities
The Emporio Armani also offers ShoZu integration, meaning you can upload images and videos directly to ShoZu straight from the file manager.
The integrated Image Editor is a very capable application, especially for a feature phone. It allows you to apply a whole bunch of effects and tweaks. Transformations and crops, as well as insertion of various items, are also available.
The M7500 Emporio Armani also has a music recognition feature (like Sony Ericsson’s TrackID): Shazam’s ‘Find Music’ service. By recording and sending a tune to the Shazam server, users can easily retrieve a track’s name and artist. Other interesting TrackID features are “Find similar Music”, “Send music info via SMS”, “TrackID charts” and a very extensive “Artist info” section.
Web Browser
The phone offers a scaled down NetFront v3.4 web browser, familiar from other Samsung phones. It has basic functionality, lacking important features like landscape/full screen views, and struggles with elaborate pages.
Organisers – Sure bit impressive
The Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani calendar offers three views – daily, weekly and monthly. There are five types of events available: appointment, anniversary, holiday, important, and private.
There are five alarm slots, each with a variety of configurable options – snooze time, repetition, etc. You can, of course, choose a custom ringtone to wake you up at a preset volume level. It’s also possible to use a predefined FM radio station to wake you up, which is a nice option for those of you who love surprises.
Miscellany
* A nifty feature that we’ve seen in all Samsung phones recently is Smart dialing. When you punch in some digits the handset automatically fetches not only the contacts whose phone numbers correspond, but also contacts whose names match the key input (much like T9 but for dialing).
* handles SMS, MMS, Push messages and email. The messages can be sorted by six criteria: date, sender, type, subject, size, and protection.
* Email retrieval is user-defined: you can choose between headers only and entire messages and the client can be set up to check mail at a chosen interval.
* 120MB of internal memory and microSD memory card slot
* Bluetooth (with A2DP) and USB v2.0
* Multi-tasking support and a convenient shortcut bar on the homescreen
* The basic document viewer works well with office files such as .xls, .doc, .pdf and loads the full version of the documents quickly and with no lag.
* As for the other applications, the phone is equipped with the usual stuff: a voice recorder, a timer, a stopwatch and an RSS reader.
* For entertainment, the games the phone bundles are Asphalt 3, Brain Challenge Vol2, Midnight Pool, Tetris Mania and World Series of Poker.
On a closing note…
Can it be a trend setter as a partying phone? Fashion and style are the right words to aptly describe Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani. Tagged with nearly double the price than the competitor phones like Walkman series or the Xpress music, M7500 would be put aside for that reason at least. With performance, it does a decent job and you would have expected more for the bugs you pay.
rakeback poker
Hey, I like keeping up to date with what people have to think about poker and all sorts of the news.I’ll be popping by in some days to check out what else you have to say.