High tech sizzles in the SGH-D500

Mobile empowerment continues with the launch of new handsets designed for increasingly converged networks and wireless communications.

Last October, Korean mobile phone maker Samsung Corp. joined the much-hyped wireless connectivity bandwagon with the launch its first Bluetooth tri-band phone – the SGH-D500.

The tech world’s increasing affection for Bluetooth technology is understandable. Bluetooth devices connect wirelessly to each other within a maximum range of 10 meters, enabling cost-free transfer of photos, images, video, messages or phonebook entries.

It is a step higher than infrared technology as Bluetooth devices do not have to be in the line of sight to transfer data. Both infrared port and Bluetooth feature, however, are available in the SGH-D500.

High tech sizzles in this new Samsung phone being positioned as a handy business communications tool doubling up as an entertainment device. This is because the SGH-D500 integrates cutting-edge mobile phone innovations in the last few years such as the 1.3-megapixel camera, built-in antenna, slide-up design, 262K color TFT-LCD screen, MP3 player, video and voice recording up to 60 minutes, 80MB storage, WAP 2.0 and syncML connectivity.

A small phone measuring only 93.5 x 45.7 x 23.5 mm and weighing 99 grams, the handset is packed with a lot of features in its diminutive body, making one wonder what more could it do if it were only an inch bigger or a few grams heavier.

Camera phone lovers will be more than happy with the D500’s flexibility with 7x digital zoom for pictures and 4x digital zoom for video.

But this reviewer was ecstatic over the 60-minute voice and video recording capability as it enables one to record a fast, unplanned interview for quick retrieval later under pressure of a deadline. It also comes in handy for recording a difficult instruction from a tech mentor, which is a lot better than a hazy memory for remembering jumbled-up tech jargon.

Snippets of ordinary life – the jeepney crowd during rush hour with the MMDA wet-flag team on the march, Makati yuppies on foot crossing the street on a Monday morning, or the rambunctious chaos that is Quiapo toward midnight – are recorded in greater detail and in living color.

Feature for feature, the D500 isn’t called the "new digital integrator" for nothing. As it explored possibilities for full integration of digital technologies, it came up armed with 80MB of shared memory, enough to store 15 to 20 MP3 songs, and of course, the hour-long voice or video clips.

If this isn’t enough fun, the huge memory and tri-band capability make it easy to browse the Internet on WAP 2.0, even on a tiny 1.9-inch screen.

Surfing the Internet on a lazy Saturday morning, this reviewer had a sampling of what mobile Internet is all about – on the D500.

Yahoo, configured to a mobile phone’s screen, was a perfect first stop. Not only does it load fast, it features shortcuts to its most popular sections – Yahoo Mail, Messenger, News, Sports, Address Book and Calendar. These are what one needs basically from Yahoo anyway.

Waiting time for download was surprisingly short and on this particular weekend morning, playwright Arthur Miller was dead at 89, Iraqi attacks on a bakery and mosque left 23 dead, Malone was set to announce his retirement.

A few clicks and scrolls up and down, the details came swaggering in on the screen. "There will be no NBA career scoring record for Karl Malone. No championship ring, either. The Mailman is retiring, having come up short in his quest for both." Good enough for an extra detail.

The D500 can save up to 15 bookmarked websites. So, from Mobile Yahoo, the next stop was wired.com. Not as lucky this time, the screen flashed: "You are reading this message either because you cannot read our CSS files or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser."

Well, what to do but click, scroll, search, skip some more until one gets to the list of articles. One Wired article caught my fancy: "Tech Does It Better." Can technology replace men? For sex workers, let’s hope so...

A bit intriguing but surfing speed was crawling and its looks more fun to read on a wide PC screen.

The next stop was none other than the most popular search engine on the Net: google.com.ph. For a query on Java 2 Micro Edition or J2ME, which the D500 uses, search results showed at least three good results – a discussion board at J2ME.org, wireless developers’ resources and tools at corej2me.com, and J2ME technology at developers.sun.com.

One of the D500’s best features is its capability to store up to 20 MP3 or AAC songs. So, my last stop was MP3.com, one of the Internet’s first online music sites which, of late, has featured in its listening room free streams of songs that inspired the movie Ray and Amon Tobin’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory soundtrack.

No chance though as login error hounded the online session. For repeatedly refusing to accept my login name and password, in the end it has to complain about insufficient memory to run the operation.

Mobile Internet obviously still has a lot of limitations and there’s no way it can approximate bigger devices that also support WAP, but give the phone some credit. For fast info on demand, even if you are miles away from a PC, it’s quite useful.