Samsung Giorgio Armani

Introduction:
In the last few years we’ve seen the mobile phone manufacturers cooperate with other companies to deliver higher quality technology, design or features, and such examples include brands like Carl Zeiss (lens manufacturer), Google (software) and in the 2007 – Prada and Armani (fashion brands). The latter is what we have here – a cooperation between Samsung and Armani resulting in the GIORGIO ARMANI phone which clearly comes as a rival of the PRADA by LG.



Design:
You will definitely notice the Armani phone ones you see it. It is different but in the good way: as it can be expected from a phone branded under the Armani name, it is highly stylish and pleasant both for the eye and the hand. It is very small and thin, comes in unique color and has metal battery cover, which helps for both the great feel and look.
Having in mind it is slim candybar with touch screen that occupies most of the front side, it reminds us of the other fashion-phone – the LG PRADA. Still, the Giorgio Armani is smaller and slimmer and instead of black comes in unique color scheme.

Once again just as in the PRADA, the camera rather ruins the look of the back side. Although here it is less noticeable than in the LG phone, we still think it could be "hidden" better, as in the KRZR K1 from Motorola for example. Additionally, it is slightly bulging, which makes it the first and probably only drawback of the design.



Specifications:
• 256,000 Colour Screen
• 3.2 Megapixel Digital Camera
• Bluetooth
• EDGE
• E-mail capabilities
• GPRS
• Java Enabled
• MP3 Player
• MP3 Ringtones
• Multimedia Messaging (MMS)
• Polyphonic Ringtones
• SMS
• Touch Screen
• Vibrating Alert
• WAP




Interface:
Samsung Giorgio Armani is one of the first non-smart phones of the brand that utilizes a touch-sensitive display. Just as the F700 which we previewed earlier, it uses the Croix-named interface. Unlike the bigger model, this one comes with color scheme to match the whole design and additionally is slightly personalized, so there are minor differences. The color scheme uses a few shades of the gold-like color, which looks way more up-to-date than the PRADA's black and white. As we are acquainted with Samsung’s line, we are not surprised seeing that it shares much with the standard software used in other phones, including the G800, G600 and the Ultra series for example. It is different, optimized for finger-based input through the display, but still is very similar, personalizing predefined modules.

Phonebook:
Although this phone isn't targeted as "smart" one, we are rather disappointed that Samsung hasn't used its best phonebook software module, but the simple one found on most other models. It allows for up to 1000 contacts with multiple numbers but without the option to add fields different than the preset. Searching is possible only by the first name.



Organizer:
The Organizer is very similar to that of other Samsung phones. Almost all of its functions are in the Applications menu. Here are the simple Memos that are limited to 1000 characters. The voice recorder can be limited to size, suitable for MMS or Email, or up to 1 hour. Here also are the World Clock, the Calculator, the unit Converter, the Timer and the Stopwatch which perform just as their names say.

Connectivity:
The Giorgio Armani-Samsung phone is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) and, unfortunately, only one frequency can be used in the USA, which means that its use will be restricted to some areas only. Like the Prada, 3G support is missing.

Software:
The Armani phone comes preloaded with software for previewing of documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF). A complex Excel file opened (although taking almost a minute to load), however, the separate worksheets are shown as pages and once we tried to load the last one, the phone showed “out of memory” error and restarted. If you are planning to use it, avoid large documents. As other models of the brand, the phone doesn’t open Office 2007 documents.