An Evening with S60 in London: Handsets

Took a look a a few of the new S60 handsets during the Evening with S60 in London event last night. They seemed to be the same ones that have been fairly widely commented on from the Smartphone Show going on at Excel yesterday and today, but it was nice to get some hands-on time anyway.

No specs for the handsets (beyond what was already known) were available, but the S60 site has them all.

Samsung i520 and i560 - Two slim slide phones that look very similar to the existing Samsung slider range that seems to be very popular amongst the ‘normal mobile’ users I know. In use it’s very obviously S60 although the icons and fonts have a Samsung look. Build quality feels good and more compact than any of the N-series handsets I’ve seen so far so I can image these will be popular with people who want stylish handsets with the options to add applications or browse the mobile web. Unbelievably the i560 has GPS built-in without any apparent effect on the size or weight… I wonder what the battery life will be like?

Samsung i450 - Another slider, but featuring an N95-esque two-way slide mechanism that exposes a curved touch input device at the top which can be used, similar to a part-exposed iPod wheel, to navigate music and videos.

Samsung i550 - A thin, but tall and wide phone most noteable for the Blackberry Pearl-style track ball. This was obviously a pre-production model, but the trackball felt too recessed and required too much movement to scroll around the menus in my opinion. Also, the keys are slim buttons underneath the printed character which was a bit fiddly - especially in the low light of the bar. This handset has GPS and HSDPA although I wasn’t able to test either. It also appeared to feature a Google search box at the bottom of the home screen which opened a browser window to execute the search.

Nokia N81 8GB - An elegent gloss black phone - it was the most attractive and stylish-looking of all the ones shown. In addition to the expected N-series media capabilities this handset also offers the N-Gage gaming platform which looked slick and produced some nice-looking 3D graphics on the games I previewed. Although I may not be remembering correctly, this two had the Google Search home-screen box so I think this may be a feature we see more widely in future.

Nokia N95 8GB - The largest of all the handsets, this is the most capable of all the handsets I looked at - the screen for this new version appeared brighter and slightly larger against a standard N95 another attendee had, although we agreed this could be an optical illusion due to the different coloured surrounds. Although not a stylish as the gloss black N81 the huge screen is predictably excellent for viewing media, taking pictures or web browsing… I’d love to try the Slingplayer client on it to see quality of playback on that resolution. I’d also be interested to see how long it is before there’s a direct Samsung competitor too, though as with an additional memory card the i560 is only a few screen inches away from having a very competitive feature set.