CorbyPro B5310
Price: Rs.11, 100(May 2010)
Samsung
CorbyPro, one of the best mobile phones available in the world today(Source: Techradar.com).
When I say this, you will be laughing, but it’s a fact. It contains everything
you need. At this price, it’s a decent buy.!
CorbyPro
is one of the best selling models of Samsung and the model belongs to the Corby
Series of touch phones. In Jan 2010, pcworld.in rated this model as the 2nd
best touch phone available in india! The phone is capacitive touch and the
screen has a resolution of 240x320. The screen clarity is excellent. The phone
weights 135grams. It has wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, FM, Image editor and built-in
applications to access Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Google search, Gmail, Google
maps, etc. but the biggest disadvantage is that the OS is Java! Even though it
has office and PDF viewers, the OS is no where near to Symbian. But on the
other side, the OS is very fast and user friendly. and enough at this
price(with same specifications, a nokia phone will costs anywhere above 19k!).
The biggest
advantage of CorbyPro is the QWERTY keyboard(slider). You can control the whole
GUI using this keyboard. The keyboard also contains shortcut keys for messages,
web etc and most of the keys have dual functions. Typing messages using QWERTY
is just fantastic. Its very useful during net browsing also. The keys are big
enough for your fingers. When you slides the keyboard, the entire GUI will
rotates 90 degree.
Other than
QWERTY keyboard, the phone contains the following physical buttons: Menu key,
Send key, Exit key, Hold key, Volume/Vibration control key, Camera etc. The
Menu key is used to access Menu and to minimize applications. The phone is recognized as mass
storage in Windows without installing any additional drives(even in Windows
98!).
The phone has
a 3.2MP camera at the back, which has no flash and cover. Also a front VGA camera
for video calls. The
quality of pics taken using 3.2MP camera are excellent during daylight and
satisfying during in-doors. Compared to image quality, the videos are not good
enough. The camera has different modes like Portrait, Landscape, Night, Sports,
Sunset, Text etc. Also it has Smile shot, Continuous shot and Panorama shot(180
degree shot) etc.
The phone is
bundled with 2GB memory card, a leather case and two additional back covers.
The phone memory is around 150MB and it supports up to 16GB MicroSD. The
battery life is very poor at default settings. So try minimizing extra tones
and vibrations. Also using memory card all the time will makes you charging the
phone daily! The GUI has no support for themes and to install new Java
applications and widgets, you need to write html codes and then execute.
The phone has
Smart Unlock feature. In locked mode, you can draw a character in the screen to
unlock. This Smart Unlock feature can also be used as a shortcut to start
different applications based on the character you draw in the screen. It
supports 25 different apps plus 18 speed dial options. You can start all those
by drawing a character in the screen when the phone is in locked condition.
Otherwise, you can press and hold the Hold key to unlock. The phone has
a capacity to store 1300 sms and also there is an option to backup the messages
to memory card. The space for MMS depends on the available free space in phone
memory. There is an option to create and view conversations and preview feature
is available for conversation without opening the message. When a messaged is
viewed, phone numbers, URL links etc are automatically highlighted. Also you
can zoom in or zoom out the messages using volume key! The disadvantage is that
you can’t send a group message to more than 10 numbers. The message can be
entered using On-screen keyboard, QWERTY keyboard and Handwriting recognition
feature! Dictionary is available even during QWERTY mode. Like all other
Samsung phones, unread messages will lie at the top.
The phone book
has a capacity of 2000 and Memo has a capacity of 100 with 1000 characters on
each. The pre-installed games are just demo version. No scientific calculations
can be done using the Calculator. The Image Editor is capable of applying basic
effects and enough for small works. The speaker has very good volume and clarity
also.
In file
manager, instant preview is available for images and videos. But you can’t set
the files in memory card as ringtone, caller id etc. Files in phone memory and
memory card can be viewed together or separately. But the size of the file is
not visible in any modes. Opening an image will automatically opens the
slideshow and images can be changed just by tilting the phone(motion sensor is
included). Actually the motion sensor is activated only when an image or video
is being viewed.