Review: Samsung Genio Touch

Pull the Samsung Genio touch out of its packaging and you could be forgiven for mistaking it, at first glance, for the Palm Pre.The gentle curves, the 2.8-inch touchscreen and the rounded button in the middle of the face are all heavily reminiscent of Palm's new baby.But where you'll pay around £600 over the lifetime of a new Pre, the Genio can be had for around £100 on a pay-as-you-go contract, and the specification sheet is still pretty compelling.Not only do you get the flavour du jour - the touchscreen - but also a 2MP camera, an FM radio and a full HTML web browser. For the fickle, it comes with three interchangeable backs.The Genio was originally called the Corby, and was marketed as a phone for kids.It's easy to see why - the bright colours and emphasis on entertainment rather than heavy-hitting business features such as Microsoft Exchange compatibility make it a tempting handset for youthful show-offs. That doesn't mean it lacks power, though. There are 27 widgets included, allowing you to access services such as Facebook and Twitter, and there are 75 more available to download, making the Genio potentially the best of both worlds: an upgradeable, flexible handset with plenty of data-handling capabilities, with none of the costs associated with top-end devices such as the Apple iPhone 3GS.Samsung has embraced the touchscreen phone, and the Genio sits towards the bottom of its nearly all-encompassing range.While devices such as the Omnia 2 and Jet build in everything but the kitchen sink, the Genio is more pared back.That means there are compromises virtually everywhere you look, but should any of them make bargain touchscreen hunters look elsewhere?The Genio's interface makes a poor first impression.Compared to the crisp, vibrant screens of top-end phones like the iPhone, Pre and HTC Hero, the Genio's screen is a little muddy and a bit blurry.The edges of characters and numbers lack definition and the less said about the horrible default wallpaper the better.That lack of sharpness isn't a problem most of the time: we were still able to hit decent speeds while tapping out messages, but it does mean that the wow-factor of some of the things you can do on a mobile these days - watching videos on YouTube or looking at photos, for instance - is a little blunted.See full-res versionThe 2.8in screen's low 320 x 240 resolution doesn't help much. Worse, the main menu can be sluggish.Tapping and dragging the widgets, which appear on the left-hand side of the screen, is frustrating as they jerk by.The Genio helps out somewhat by providing haptic feedback whenever you touch it - it gives a short buzz of vibration when you touch the screen, which is handy for instantly telling whether your input has been recognised.The drawback is that out of the box, this is a noisy companion. Every single touch on the screen is accompanied by an irritating digital bleep or tune. These can, at least, be turned off in the settings menu.PositivesIt isn't all bad, though. Samsung's bizarrely-named TouchWiz interface is sensible and easy to get around. The icons on the screen work well and are the right size for the tip of a finger - we never encountered a situation where we wanted a stylus.A final usability word goes to the Genio's overall build.It feels very light and thin in the hand, which is broadly a good thing, but without any significant weight anywhere on the phone it feels a little unbalanced, and certainly doesn't have the luxurious feel of handsets such as the HTC Hero.Even if it doesn't look it, every time you pick it up you'll be reminded that the Genio is a budget phone.The widget engine is fairly effective. It's a simple idea - drag a widget icon off the left-hand scrollbar onto the phone's desktop and it's installed.For instance, you can install the Facebook widget and access your friends' data and write status updates without needing to visit the browser.The lack of on-screen real estate is combatted by swiping your finger from side to side, revealing supplementary home screens either side of the original.The number of available widgets is good enough and encompasses most of the major social networking sites, although it would be surprising to see wide support from application developers.The logical layout of the Genio's operating system is evident by the way it prioritises calling.Along the bottom of the screen are buttons for launching the keypad and the phonebook, and while neither of these two apps are visual treats, they do the job nicely.Call quality was good in our experience, although the way the Genio curves up to a surprisingly sharp edge at the top means it isn't always comfortable against the ear, although you can always use the included hands-free headset.This is a double-edged sword - the upside is that you can use any 3.5mm headphones with it, and because the 3.5mm jack is after-all the hands free microphone, you can still use the Genio with a decent set of cans.The downside is that the microphone needs to be plugged in to the Genio's data connector, which leaves the port's protective plastic cover hanging down. It didn't break off while we were using it, but it feels flimsy and seems poorly suited to ratting around in a pocket.MessagingThe Genio doesn't have a full-screen QWERTY keyboard and there's no accelerometer to detect when it's been flipped onto its side. Any application that wants to be used in landscape mode needs to supply a button to flip it around.The lack of a QWERTY keyboard is a definite drawback - typing, even on a decent T9 keypad, is naturally slower.However, while the Genio's interface lacks sharpness, it's incredibly responsive when entering text. Tapping on the same button multiple times to get different letters is intuitive thanks to the way the phone vibrates when you do anything, and we never had a problem entering text.You don't get much space to enter text though - the keypad takes up three-fifths of the screen, then another fifth is occupied by a box allowing you to choose from likely words, and then you get a single line for reading and entering your actual message.For writing out 160-character SMS messages this is perfectly adequate: you're unlikely to lose your train of thought and need to go back to re-read your message. However, it does mean that the Genio falls down when you start trying to email people with it.Its support for email is surprisingly good for such a cheap phone. You might not get anything as sophisticated as support for Exchange, but it supports both POP3 and IMAP email boxes and setting up an email address is easy. You can even set up more than one account.However, just supporting a few inboxes isn't enough. For the Genio to come anywhere close to the messaging power of the iPhone and its top-class brethren, writing an email needs to be much easier. If all you want to do is scan-read your email and perhaps bash out a few word replies the Genio just about suffices. For more serious messaging tasks you should be looking elsewhere.Internet and connectivityThe Genio's lack of connectivity options is also worth mentioning. It's a quad-band phone, which is par for the course, and data connections are handled by its EDGE radio.However, there's no sign of 3G, which means serious web browsing is out of the question, and Wi-Fi is another missing luxury, so you don't even get a speed boost when you're within range of a wireless network. Nor is there a GPS chip, and therefore no maps application.The Genio's full HTML web browser is a bit of a white elephant. It's good to have it - the 2.8-inch screen, while small compared to some, is big enough to present pages well - but it's ultimately very frustrating to use. In our experience web pages that render fast on 3G phones took an age to appear on the Genio's EDGE connection.You can browse the web in either landscape or portrait modes, but if you want to do anything other than use the Genio for surfing the web very, very occasionally, you're better off looking at a more fully featured phone.If you're thinking of getting a phone with a decent camera, the Genio isn't the place to look.Not only are the images produced by the 2MP sensor tiny at just 1,600 x 1,200, they look poor.See full-res versionA tendency to overexpose and a susceptibility to lens flare meant that pictures taken outdoors looked blown out and weak.See full-res versionWe also noticed softness and poor colour accuracy. The camera is at least responsive, and there are some decent modes, such as the different self-timer settings, which are good for taking pictures of yourself and friends.See full-res versionThere's also a continuous mode which takes nine frames in about seven seconds, but in order to ease the load on the camera and the phone's processing hardware images are downsized even further to a measly 320 x 240 pixels.MediaEncouragingly, the Genio includes a widget for YouTube, but this is a disappointment from the start.To begin with, all the widget does is launch a web browser and redirects you to m.youtube.com, and secondly, because of the slow data connections, actually watching anything without letting it buffer fully, is laughably hard going.That means you need to have a decent stock of media ready before you leave the house, and the Genio is reasonable good on this count.It doesn't have much in the way of built-in memory - just 50MB is enough for a small commuter's library of music - but there's a microSD slot buried under the battery cover, and the Genio supports up to 8GB of external memory. The media player is no iPod, though. It works well enough, but it looks appallingly basic.One area we can't criticise the Genio in is its integrated FM radio. This largely atones for the inability to stream rich media such as video. We had no problems finding stations, and the player can tell you which radio station you're tuned to, as well as exactly which show you're listening to.The bundled headphones are good enough, besides being non-leaky plug-style affairs. The FM radio can't be played over the Genio's speaker unless the headphones are plugged in - they act as an aerial.Battery life from the Genio was excellent.Over three days, with frequent calls and text messages, the odd bit of web browsing and the occasional refresh of the email inbox, plus a photography session in which the screen was left almost constantly on for hours, it lost a single bar of battery life.The 960mAh battery doesn't have to work that hard - with no Wi-Fi or 3G chips to support the Genio merely sips electricity, making this a superb choice if you regularly find yourself away from the mains for a few days.The ultimate convenience would be being able to charge the Genio via a mini-USB plug, but alas the data connector is proprietary.Organiser and synchronisationThe ability to use social networking is a definite plus when it comes to using the Genio to keep things together.In particular, if you use Facebook to keep track of events and so on, the Genio could be a godsend.However, integration isn't as tight as we'd like. You can't download Facebook events to the phone's calendar, so it won't actually notify you when they're bearing down on you.And, while there's a reasonable calendar application included, the inability to sync from the internet is a real hassle compared to top-end touchscreen phones.Synchronisation is another bugbear for anyone in need of a phone that will help keep them organised. Our review model didn't come with a USB cable in the box, so the only way to keep it synchronised was by painfully slow Bluetooth.Nor do you get a synchronisation application in the box - instead, you need to download Samsung's PC Studio, a 117MB download.This is a reasonable piece of work when it comes to copying photos from your phone, and will be user friendly to anyone alarmed by the complexity of Outlook.However, lack of integration with the latter means you'll need to adopt it as your primary calendar and scheduling application if you're going to get much use from it.The Genio feels like a cheap phone. Its build quality isn't particularly convincing and its interface looks cheap, although this is largely by dint of the rather blurry, low resolution screen.Samsung has also made some significant cuts to the list of features to bring the Genio in at a bargain basement price.We liked:The Genio is certainly a bargain, and if all you want is a simple, fun phone for calling and texting people, there's no significant reason not to consider it at under £100.Its media handling abilities aren't particularly graceful, but they work, and the inclusion of the FM tuner is useful.The bundled headphones are pretty good as well, and the fact that you can attach your own 'phones as long as they have a 3.5mm audio connector is a definite plus.The interface might not be terribly responsive, but we never experienced a crash even with multiple widgets running. Writing text messages is also easily done, and you'll hit decent speeds in no time - if your current phone has a T9-enabled keypad you'll have no trouble upgrading to this one.We disliked:Power users should look elsewhere. The Genio's email abilities are hampered by the lack of a full QWERTY keyboard and limited space for text entry, and the omission of 3G or wireless puts a major dent in the Genio's data handling abilities.And, even if 3G was present, it's unlikely it would improve the browsing experience much thanks to the limited internet browser.The interface also re-inforces the Genio's budget positioning. The screen is demonstrably worse than other touchscreen handsets.It's responsive enough, but the edges of text are blurry and relatively indistinct, which is annoying.Verdict:The Genio is an also-ran in the war of the touchscreen phones.It offers a few organisational, web browsing and social networking features, but unfortunately that doesn't make it anywhere near as fun to use or as handy as a bona fide smartphone.The lack of 3G makes it grindingly slow compared to others and the inability to sync with proper office applications or online services such as Google Calendar is annoying.The interface isn't particularly subtle and the screen isn't as crisp as some.It's an undeniable bargain, though - if you're looking for a for a neat, functional touchscreen handset on a budget this could be it - but we'd advise saving up a while longer.Related LinksSee Samsung Genio Touch deals at OmioTechRadar's reviews guaranteeMore mobile phone reviewsRelated StoriesReview: Sony Ericsson AinoReview: Sony Ericsson W395Review: HTC TattooReview: T-Mobile MDA Compact VReview: T-Mobile Pulse

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