Review by Marley C. Reyes
"Pocket-sized, feature packed," it says on the box. When I got the E370 I got curious as to how accurate this claim is and so I immediately put it through its paces.
Put the slider E370 beside Samsung's own D500 and D600, and it'll look like the baby of the Samsung slider phone family. It's so small and lightweight - at only 86 x 43.1 x 20.3mm and 85 grams - that when I put it on my desk, my coffee cup (not mug) dwarfed the phone; it's that small.
This triband phone has the customary animated menu icons that I find really amusing. The E370 is available in six different colors, but the test unit I got came in ebony black, which is very classy and chic. Speaking of colorful, the 128 x 160-pixel TFT display supports up to 65,536 colors.
It has a 1.3MP camera with flash that takes high-quality photos as well as videos recorded in MPEG4 format; a dedicated camera button is located on the side of the phone. The E370's music player supports MP3, AAC, and AAC+ formats, so it's better to convert those .wma files first if you want to listen to your favorite tunes on the phone. You can transfer photos, data, and audio files to a PC and vice versa through Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 1.1. If you suddenly find yourself with nothing better to do, the E370 has embedded JAVA games to keep you busy. I especially like the "Forgotten Warrior" game and it's pretty easy to play.
While the E370 has a fairly large 1000 phonebook memory and a 200 text message capacity, one of its downsides is the 40MB onboard memory. If you're a multimedia person, 40MB just doesn't cut it. It could use an external memory slot, but, alas, it's only a dream.
So, does the E370 live up to its claim? Relatively, it does. For a phone this small, it does offer a lot. But place it side-by-side the newer, more advanced models, then the E370 seems wanting. All in all, this small Samsung slider is a good phone that will impress mostly women who are looking for handsets that will fit their small bags or purses.
GRINS
? small and lightweight
? packed with more features than you'd expect from a phone this small
GRIMACES
? small onboard memory
THE LOWDOWN
A small wonder.
