Going into the 2010 Mobile World Congress just concluded, Korea’s leading mobile phone maker unveiled its foray into the budget entry levels feature phones with two Monte variants of the superbly endowed Monte S5620 touchscreen it announced before the event.
These are the Samsung Monte Bar C3200 and the Monte Slider E2550 which, as the names indicate, belong to the new Monte range of handsets and are in the candy bar and slider form factors, respectively.
No Nonsense Features at a Glance
The Monte Bar is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900). There’s no WiFi or 3G as Samsung knows its target markets won’t ever bother with expensive data plans. Local data connectivity gets support from its microUSB 2.0 ad Bluetooth 2.1 for wired and wireless data synching, respectively.
Its 111.8 x 46.9 x 13.3 mm candybar body takes a proportionate 2-inch TFT LCD display with QVGA resolution and 256k colours. Imaging comes from a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera with QCIF video recording at 15fps frame rates.
Phone memory is a decent 40 MB and supports up to 1,000 phonebook entries with Photocall facility. It also has microSD expandability for up to 8 GB. A standard 960 mAh li-ion battery gets you up to 8.3 hours of talk time and up to 500 hours of standby time on a single charge.
Multimedia gets the usual playback support for the popular audio and video files, stereo FM receiver with RDS and FM recording and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP for wireless stereo headsets and a 3.5mm headphone jack for wired regular headsets. There’s also DNSe (Dynamic Natural Sound engine) for enhancing the listening experience with stereo widening the surround sound effects.
As a basic handset, the Monte Bar has no pretensions of being a social networking phone so there are no SNS apps. You still get a WAP 2.0 HTML browser but we doubt its primary users would enjoy surfing at a 2-inch screen over slow GPRS or EDGE speeds. .
Conclusion
Budget entry level phones appeal to the widest segments of the market and comprise the bread and butter of mobile phone makers. Samsung knows this and promptly analyses their lifestyles and buying patterns to design the handsets that will directly appeal to these markets.
The Samsung Monte bar C3200 has only a cosmetic ergonomic heritage from the rich Monte S5620. Apart from that and the DNSe feature, there’s really nothing to tie it up to the marque. But on its own, its one capable handset devoid of any pretence to internet access and gets down to the basics with only those frills the market has come to expect on even budget phones. But even those frills get stripped to their barest elements.
Expect the Monte Bar to reach the markets in the 2nd quarter together with its other Monte products. We have not been favoured with pricing information but as a budget candybar at its most basic, we expect its price to be in line with most other entry level feature phones.
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surroundsoundspeaker