Like every maker out there, Samsung are keen to keep users coming back for more. But serving, inspiring and entertaining today's crowd is not enough it seems. So the next step is raising future Samsung users. The S3650 Corby is tech-savvy and fresh - just like its target audience. And this entry level touchscreen seems to quite nicely suit both the user's liking and bill-payer's budget.
The S3650 Corby is for youngsters that are keen on technology, for active social networkers, for those who like to personalize and customize. The budget price implies no fancy stuff but the wide range of features is absolutely relevant to the target audience.
Samsung S3650 Corby is a very fresh looking handset too - distinct shape and bold paintjobs. It won't really make much sense in adult hands but the Fashion Jackets - bright-colored interchangeable rear covers - are perhaps as strong a selling point as the capacitive touchscreen. There're two extra Jackets in the retail box to make the time spent with the S3650 Corby even more personal experience.
On the social side, the Samsung S3650 Corby offers Facebook, MySpace and Twitter integration, while photo and video sharing are taken care of with direct uploads to YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket. You can update your status on the various social networking sites and receive updates from your friends via a neat pop-up notification feature. All that is a tap away on the 2.8" capacitive touchscreen.
Key features
- Quad-band GSM/EDGE
- 2.8" capacitive TFT touchscreen of QVGA resolution
- 90 MB onboard storage, microSD card slot (up to 8GB)
- 2 megapixel fixed-focus camera with smile detection, QVGA@15fps video recording
- FM radio with RDS
- Find Music recognition service
- TouchWiz and Cartoon UI
- Social networking integration with direct file uploads
- Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
- Office document viewer
- Smart unlock
- Interchangeable rear covers (Fashion Jackets), ships with two extra panels
- Relatively low price for a full touch phone (around 150 euro)
Main disadvantages
- No 3G
- The camera has no autofocus or flash
- No accelerometer for screen auto rotation
- No on-screen QWERTY keyboard
- Proprietary connectivity port
- No smart dialing
- microSD slot under the battery cover
- no changable themes
- screen size is just similar to samsung champ.
- Outdated because of new models of other companies, time for a update
Samsung S3650 live shots • S3650 Corby's fresh paintjobs
Budget and low end can be easily mixed up with the Corby. But along with the features mentioned above, the basic handset has a lot of the technology used in the more expensive Samsung Jet. The S3650 Corby supports the same finger zoom feature, it has smart unlock and runs the widget-based TouchWiz user interface - not to mention the nice Samsung's home-brew web browser.
Samsung S3650 Corby style photos
Design and construction
The plastic construction of the S3650 Corby certainly helps it keep its weight down to a svelte 92 grams. The entire surface is glossy and this definitely does not help you get rid of fingerprints. We've played around with the phone for a while to find it is quite resistant to scratches in defiance of it sleek front. Ergonomically it's very good and the oval shaped back panel makes gripping it easier.
The 2.8" display takes centerstage on the S3650 front. It has a 240 x 320 pixel resolution, just like most previous generation touchscreens by Samsung. Its image quality isn't as impressive as that on high-end Samsungs with capacitive displays, but it isn't too bad either.
As we already mentioned, the S3650 Corby touchscreen uses the capacitive technology, which requires only a touch rather than a push to register a click. Even the lightest of touches does the trick which is probably a large part of the reason why people buy touchscreen phones in the first place.
The sunlight legibility is well below the iPhone or Nokia standards, the narrow viewing angle the biggest disadvantage. Indoors the screen is quite good though, as one would expect.
A 2.8" capacitive touchscreen is the gateway to the S3650 Corby
Above the display, there's just the earpiece - there's no ambient light sensor to adjust the brightness of the display. Below the screen there are three hardware keys - two receiver keys on each side of the Back button. The Call and End keys are integrated into the body of the phone and have a distinct and audible click when pressed. Right under the back key is the tiny mouthpiece.
The hardware keys are very comfortable to use
The S3650 Corby's right-hand side houses just two controls - the shutter button and the HOLD key, which is used to lock and unlock the touchscreen. They are barely separated, which doesn't provide the best touch orientation. On that same side, only hidden under the battery cover, is the microSD card slot.
The right side with the camera and Hold key
The lanyard eyelet is on the top left side, followed by the volume rocker in the middle and the proprietary connectivity port beneath for plugging in a charger, data cable and headset. We would have preferred a more standard connector here like microUSB. Traditionally for Samsung, the USB slot is covered with a plastic lid.
The very busy left side: lanyard eyelet, volume rocker, and connectivity port
The top and bottom parts are absolutely bare, save for a tiny slit for removing the battery cover.
The rounded top and bottom are bare
The smooth rear cover houses only the camera lens at one end and the loudspeaker grill at the other. Samsung call the back panel a Fashion Jacket, and will offer a number of exchangeable panels for the phone. Two of them will ship with the handset to spice things up a bit.
Those Corbies that we have here are merely the basic color versions. The available additional Fashion Jackets change the styling dramatically.
The rear panel is called a Fashion Jacket; two exchangeable covers will be included in the retail package
The smallest TouchWiz
Lively, colorful and pleasantly thumbable - the TouchWiz interface feels right at home in this entry level touchscreen, in which fun and ease of use are key.
The S3650 Corby offers three different homescreen panes that you can alternate by sideways sweeps. The current selection is indicated by three small dots at the bottom of the screen.
You can fill up each of those homescreens with as many widgets as you like. The different wallpapers are actually three parts of a single panoramic desktop, just like on the Samsung S8000 Jet.
In case some of you have missed it, widgets are nifty mini-apps that reside on your home screen. Some of them seem to have more purpose, such as the calendar and world clock, image gallery or the mp3/radio players, while others range from fun to pointless.
Traditionally, all the widgets are stored in a tray running down the side of the screen, which you can pull in and out as needed using the small arrow in the lower left corner.
You can pick which widgets to display by simply dragging them onto the display and placing them where you want. If any need to be removed, you simply drag them back to the tray. The nice accelerometer-based option to auto-align widgets by shaking the handset is at your disposal too.
The TouchWiz homescreen • the main menu
The homescreen and the new icon graphics aside, the rest of the S3650 Corby interface is typical Samsung (or at least the latest revision seen on the Samsung Jet). You have a tab at the bottom of the display which holds the three contextual keys with varying functionality based on the currently active menu. There are also some nice animations and transition effects throughout the interface.
The main menu displays as a 3 x 4 grid of icons, while sub-menus appear as lists. The main menu itself, as on the Samsung S8000 Jet, now stretches over three different screens and is sweep-scrollable sideways. The reason that so much more space was needed is the fact that almost all apps are now brought to the main menu, arranged in a flat iPhone-like structure. You will only need to dig deeper for the settings but if those were also brought to the fore, the main menu would most certainly have become a huge mess.
The Samsung S3650 Corby also supports multitasking, which means that Java applications can be minimized to run in the background. However, there is no hardware key to allow you to switch between the apps, which certainly makes multitasking much less of a treat.
Samsung have also enabled the S3650 Corby with the Smart unlock feature, previously known as Gesture lock. Smart unlock allows users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item, application - even dial a contact - just by drawing a letter on the unlock screen.
Smart unlock
Each letter from A to Z can be set as a gesture by the user to perform the various actions in question. For instance, you can use it to start apps like the music player, messaging menu, the web browser, Java apps or the dialing keypad.
The S3650 Corby sports a brand new cute little theme designed especially for this handset's young audience. We guess it's part of the whole dynamic Cartoon UI thing that was much advertised by Samsung. In our pre-market sample though there was no trace of a context-dependent wallpaper or any dynamic changes. The theme itself is quite alright, with neatly drawn icons and hand-writing font in the list menus.
The youth theme
A standard phonebook
The phonebook of the Samsung S3650 Corby has it all. Up to 2000 contacts can be stored with multiple fields. It can display the names from the SIM card, the phone memory or both at once. Searching is done by gradual typing of the desired contact's name.
The Corby phonebook
Quite a number of different detail fields are available for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers, 4 email addresses, URLs and so on. Each contact can also be assigned a specific ringtone and picture, as well as a note. You can even set a video as "caller's image".
Some nice telephony features
The Samsung S3650 Corby is excellent at its main job - making calls - we experienced no reception or voice quality drops for the time of our review.
There's not much to say about the dialer. You dial just like you would on any touch phone. There are three virtual buttons - phonebook, more and back. When you type a number or look it up in the contact list, by tapping More you can access options like voice call, send message or add to phonebook. Of course you have the hardware call buttons too.
Making a call • the virtual keypad
Unfortunately the handset has no smart dialing, which could have saved the users some digging in the phonebook.
While the dialer itself is not very interesting, there's a flashier way to dial. The Photo Contacts are shown as a stack of pictures. Tapping on a photo brings up a menu with options to start a voice call or send a message. The Photo Contacts are changed since the last implementation of the TouchWiz UI in the Jet and they now automatically store picture links to the most used contacts. The option to tag people's faces is no longer available. The feature makes more sense now as it's fully automatic and as long as you have assigned images to your contacts, you'll be alright.
Photo Contacts
Messaging is good
As you might expect, the Samsung S3650 handles all common message types. The handset has a shared editor for SMS and MMS and a separate one for emails. A rich T9 dictionary is at the user's disposal too. There is no landscape QWERTY keyboard available here, perhaps due to the small screen size. Still we would have preferred it if users had that choice for themselves to make.
Messages menu • composing an SMS
There is also a native email client. It failed to retrieve Gmail settings automatically so we had to enter them manually, but once that's done, emailing is a breeze.
The attachment limit for sending is 5MB, which is enough for most file types. If you receive an office document as an attachment, you will be able to view it as well thanks to the integrated office document viewer.
Social networking on the go
As promised by the manufacturer, the S3650 Corby comes with social integration disguised under three neat homescreen widgets - MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
All three widgets have similar interface - a big update button at the top, a text field for your current mood/status message and some buttons the bottom.
In the MySpace widget the available options include checking your messages, getting into chat and adding friends. The Facebook widget offers again checking your messages, adding new friends and its last option is poking a friend. Finally the Twitter widget has only two virtual keys - friends and followers. The Settings button is available everywhere offering options for auto-refresh and adding a photo.
2 megapixel camera
The Samsung S3650 Corby features a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera for maximum image resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels.
The camera does not have auto-focus, but it sports the nice Smile shot feature. Basically when it's on, pushing the camera button doesn't immediately result in taking the picture. Instead, the camera just starts tracking the framed face. As soon as the person smiles, the handset takes the shot for you automatically.
The camera interface is nicely touch-optimized and is certainly among the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device.
The camera interface
The camera is not some spectacular performer, but it's quite alright for a 2 megapixel snapper. The iPhone 3G can hardly do any better, you know. Noise suppression is a bit too aggressive at times, eradicating all fine detail, but it seems passable.
MySpace, Facebook and Twitter widgets • SettingsAs you see, the widgets aren't exactly full of features, but the basics seem covered. They are more than enough to keep you connected to your social circle on the go.
Social networking integration stretches even further to having a dedicated item in the main menu. The Communities item gets you links to websites such as Facebook, Picasa and Flickr and the ability to directly upload files. You can also preset your login details so you don't have to enter them each time you access those websites or try to upload content from the file manager - the S3650 Corby stores your credentials for you.
Communities list • Settings • Uploading a photo
That pretty much covers what Samsung have been doing in the social networking department. Unfortunately, there's no phonebook integration such as the one offered by HTC Sense UI on the HTC Hero and HTC HD2 or the MotoBLUR UI on the Motorola Milestone/Droid.
No matter how limited, the controls available on the Samsung Corby allow you to chat, update your status, post tweets, upload photos and read your friends' new posts. Despite the lack of 3G, all these are barely traffic-intensive, so you won't miss HSDPA speeds.
Fast file browser
The S3650 Corby's file browser can display the files and folders from the phone memory or the memory card, and even both at once.
There are folders for different types of files (images, video, sounds) to let the handset sort the memory contents.
However, you are not forced to follow this structure - you can place your files wherever you want and the phone will have no problems handling them.
The file browser is quite efficient
You can copy or move files - both one by one or in bulk, and you can create and delete new folders (except the predefined folders, like Images, Sounds and so on).
Files can also be sent via Bluetooth, one by one again, or in bulk. Throughout the whole file manager you can pick files you would like to lock to prevent accidental deletion.
Reading from the memory card is quick and won't bother users at all. Listing the thumbnails of pictures stored in the respective folder on the memory card is quite fast too.
The initiatialization speed of the memory card is surprisingly fast: regardless of the capacity, the S3650 Corby recognizes a memory card in 10-15 seconds. The phone comfortably handles a 16GB microSD card full of thousands of different files. Working with the files on the memory card once it's initialized is fast enough to satisfy most users; however, speed does drop when the card starts filling up.
Gallery is basic, but gets the job done
Unlike recent Samsung devices like the S8300 UltraTOUCH, the S3650 Corby has only one picture gallery. However, that can't be considered an issue since the gallery it does have is fully functional. You'll most likely not miss the Photo browser despite its eye-catching qualities.
The S3650 Corby gallery is an inherent part of the file manager and launching it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.
Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep your fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. Browsing the images is really fast and responsive with no lag thanks to the capacitive screen.
Zooming in is easy enough though not as responsive as we would have like it. You have the one-finger zooming but it kicks in after you spend some considerable amount of time (like 3 sec) touching the image with your thumb. From there on it's just a matter of dragging your finger up for zooming in and down for zooming out.
There is a second zoom control which is more conventional - a zoom bar with thumbable loupe icons that allows you to actually zoom with tapping instead of dragging.
Browsing images in landscape mode is also available. As there's no accelerometer for automatic rotation, you can can switch to landscape view via t the dedicated toggle on screen.
Viewing a single image
Music player and FM radio
The music player of the Samsung S3650 is exactly the same as in the Jet and Star and hasn't been altered much from the M8800 Pixon.
It allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.
The music player does the job
The music player also has a dedicated homescreen widget, allowing quick access to the full version of the application with only a single tap. You can also start, stop and alternate tracks straight from the home screen if you prefer.
The equalizer offers the standard presets like pop, jazz, classic, etc. but it also packs three additional options - widening, dynamic and surround effects.
Last, but certainly not least, the player is nicely touch-optimized to include fast forward and rewind, just like on the S5600. This adds up to an excellent music application that can fully replace your portable MP3 player.
The Samsung S3650 Corby features an FM radio with RDS. The S3650 Corby's radio app offers intuitive controls and has the Find Music recognition service implemented, which works much like Sony Ericsson's TrackID.
The FM radio application • the radio and player widgets
The radio app is in the Applications menu but the Radio widget on the home screen gives you more immediate access. Tapping on it brings up the radio or you could just use the widget's controls to start/stop the radio or change the station. It can only skip between saved stations though, and if you want to search you'll have to do it in the actual app.
Speaking of stations, you can save stations but they are labeled just by their frequency and you can't rename them. There's a separate list for your favorite stations though.
The video player is OK
The video player has a simple interface with not too many features. All the basic are covered though, and that should really be enough as the screen size doesn't really lend itself to watching whole movies.
The video player of Samsung S3650 Corby
The player supports MP4 videos but we only managed to get QVGA samples running. VGA resolution videos we tried were a no go.
Excellent web browser
The Samsung S3650 Corby, like the Samsung S8000 Jet, features the new WebKit-based Dolfin web browser, which is a home-brew application. With full Flash support and the new one-finger zooming algorithm, it is one of the finest web browsers we have seen on a feature phone.
The one-finger zooming works like a charm too. Of course you can also rely on double tapping a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in to it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level.
The web browser is just great
In addition to Flash and Java support, the new web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view. You can scroll by simply sweeping a finger across the screen. The actual scrolling is very choppy and is perhaps the only downside to browsing.
As suggested, the full Flash support extends to include full featured YouTube videos as well. Given that EDGE is your only connectivity option, we guess however that using the light handheld version at m.youtube.com will be way more practical.
The mobile version of YouTube: streaming video
Final words
There's nothing unique about the Samsung S3650 Corby but there's no way you can miss it. No, you won't be considering it, unless you're of a certain age, but you'll notice it and perhaps even appreciate it. Neatly repackaged to appeal to its intended audience, the S3650 Corby makes sense as an entry level offering. What's more - given its specific targeting - the phone seems capable of convincing those who'll be using it and those who'll be buying it.
The S3650 Corby is a simple, affordable and attractive touchscreen with modest but very focused feature set. It is designed to be small, to suit the social needs of youngsters and to be trendy. Its styling and Fashion Jackets are quite relevant too. Camera, MP3 player, capacitive touchscreen, neat user interface and distinct design are enough to seal the deal.
There's no shortage of basic touchscreens lately but the S3650 Corby's specific targeting makes it quite hard to pinpoint a direct competitor. An almost textbook example in this segment though is LG KP500 Cookie - pretty much the standard along with the Samsung Star for appeal, affordability, fun and ease of use. The Cookie has similar features and looks a bit more serious (as if teens and tweens care) and costs a bit less, now that it's been around for a while.
LG KP500 Cookie
Looking into the Samsung back catalogue you get the S3650 Corby's most likely prototype - the S5230 Star. With almost the same specs and price, but with different - more mainstream - design, bigger (resistive) touchscreen and a 3 megapixel camera, the Star is selling like hotcakes. The new Star is also keen to play along, sporting Wi-Fi and a duly upgraded price tag.
Samsung S5230 Star • Samsung S5230W Star WiFi
Talking of competitors, let's not forget one of the latest mid-range XpressMusic devices - the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic. Its price tag is heftier (30 euro more) but the extra cash gets you Symbian OS, Wi-Fi support, a 3-megapixel autofocus shooter and solid music pedigree. And of course, if you prefer, you can surely get the Wi-Fi-less version that comes with GPS - the Nokia 5230.
Nokia 5530 XpressMusic • Nokia 5230
Spending a week with the S3650 Corby we found ourselves liking it very much. It's pretty hard to imagine though it will ever outgrow its niche. A phone for tweens and teens, the S3650 Corby will hardly repeat the sales of the Star. But if it finds its intended audience it will probably do quite well for Samsung in the long run. Giving a tween a S3650 Corby may not make them a future geek. But a loyal user will suit Samsung just fine.
adopted from : gsm arena (due to lack of time foe typing)
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