Thin is in

Samsung's Ultra Edition phones are a part of the company's global strategy to take on a leadership position in the mobile market.

The Samsung Ultra Edition has made its debut in India with the X820. A slider and a clamshell are soon expected to join the series. Samsung has chosen to excite consumers by delivering smaller and thinner mobile phones without compromising on reliability or premium multimedia capabilities.

It looks like Samsung thought its phone designs could take inspiration from Motorola Razr but with a 'Samsung Flavour'. The leader of the pack, X820, weighs 66 g and is all of 113 x 50 x 6.9 mm making it the world's skinniest mobile. (Motorola Razr V3 is almost 14 mm, Nokia N90 is 24 mm thick).

Looking at the box, you tend to think "this isn't so slim", but hold it in your hands and you would be amazed at how such an anorexic device can cram in anything. The phone can be aptly described as one that makes Motorola's SLVR/Razr range look like a pie-gorging slab o'lard.

How has the Korean giant managed to keep its thickness at 6.9 mm? Reinforcing plastic with glass fiber that allowed to come at 0.7 mm thickness of battery section cover.

Simply put, it means that plastic cover is not more than 1 mm thick, for instance, the battery cover of X820 can be bent in every direction. Noticeably, plastic's flexibility guarantees that phone will not crack into pieces in the back pocket of your jeans or when you sit on a chair.

Peccadillos
The only inconvenience design-wise is the bump on the back of the phone, which is there because of the 2-megapixel camera. The display menu has been common for next to last generation of handsets for Samsung.

No changes on that side. At 80 MB of embedded memory, there is no slot for expansion. It also limits your ability to store music, pictures and files. Battery, while testing, lasted up to 3-3.5 hours which is bad news for few.

Since the X820 is extremely slim, it bears the same flaw peculiar to all thin handsets (7-8 mm thick) "� all these devices tend to heat up very fast. And annoyingly, the Samsung X820 cannot vibrate and ring simultaneously.

The camera (a 2-megapixel) delivers good images that look rich on the 262K display. The model rivals Nokia N70 in terms of image quality, as hardware specifications of both devices coincide. Video clips of up to 352x288 pixels can be recorded, and are in MP4 format with sound and zoom capability.

The video quality is relatively good keeping in mind that it's a phone after all. The sound of the integrated speaker is quite loud and sounds really good. The music player can play in background mode while you use the phone for other things.

There is a WAP browser (version 2.0), similar to Nokia and Sony Ericsson, that automatically offers you standard prefixes and endings of the entered addresses.

It's feature-packed, but it would make more sense if you replace it with Opera Mini (Opera uses a remote server to pre-process Web pages before sending them to your phone. Web content is optimised for your device, ensuring fast browsing and a great user experience).  

The email client is very good with options to create up to five POP3/IMAP accounts. It even offers a simple anti-spam filter, which is sufficient while replying to urgent mails.

Worth taking the call
Do I need this phone just because it's slim? Well, it's slim, attractive and crammed with functions, so why not? I would say it's for those who do not want to compromise on space and functionality and fork out Rs 16,499 for this lanky mobile phone. But Samsung must introduce some new colours, other than black.

The D900, which is expected soon in India, is fast becoming a hot favourite, internationally. This slider reportedly has dimensions of just 103.5 x 41 x 12.9 mm yet crams in a 3.13 megapixel camera with auto focus, flash and a stunning 2.1 inch, 240 x 320 display.

Topped with 80 MB of onboard memory, a microSD expansion slot, office document viewer software, TV output, Bluetooth and multimedia player, it promises to be a worthwhile phone.