Samsung SGH-D900 review: Samsung SGH-D900

Samsung is touting its SGH-D900 as its flagship GSM phone for fall 2006, even giving the device a sexy name--the Black Carbon. The company claims the SGH-D900 is the world's slimmest slider phone, but we're sure another phone will emerge to silence this claim soon enough. In the meantime, the Black Carbon is certainly skinny, yet manages to pack in a ton of features. While the Samsung SGH-D900 is not available with a U.S. carrier, you can purchase an unlocked version for $385 to $410.

The Black Carbon certainly lives up to its name. The D900 looks like a slab of sculpted charcoal, with a wide surface and very slim profile. Measuring 4.07x2.01x0.51 inches and weighing 3.28 ounces, it is lightweight and can easily slip into a pocket or a purse. The phone's sides and back come in a nice matte finish, that provides good grip while making calls. The left spine is home to the volume rocker and the MicroSD card slot, while a dedicated camera button and a headset jack sit on the right spine. The camera lens, as well as a self-portrait mirror and LED flash light, appear on the back of the phone when the phone is slid open.

To open the phone, push the surface of the phone upward. It feels most natural to do this with your thumb, but even then, we found it awkward as the front of the phone is slippery. A small plastic ledge underneath the display does make this a little easier. Yet as the navigation keypad is located underneath the ledge, we often accidentally pressed keys when we opened the phone. You can also adjust slider settings to answer calls when opened, for example, or hang up when closed.

The D900's display is absolutely stunning. At 2.2-inches on the diagonal, the 262,000-color screen displays rich and vibrant colors and easy-to-read text, even under bright daylight. As with other Samsung phones, the menu interface is colorful and animated, and we especially liked that you could view the submenu of each menu option when scrolling down the lists. You can adjust the screen's brightness, as well as its backlight timer. The dialing text can be configured with different backgrounds, font styles, font colors, and animation styles. Text messaging fonts can also be adjusted.

The navigation keypad is located underneath the display, while sliding the phone cover upward reveals the alphanumeric keypad. The navigation controls include: two soft keys; a four-way toggle that doubles as four user-defined shortcuts; a middle OK button that also serves as a shortcut to the Web browser; the Talk and End keys; and a Cancel key. The flat navigation keys felt slippery, while the alphanumeric keypad was similarly flat and flush to the phone's surface. We found the number keys well spaced apart, but they were still a little too flat to be comfortable.

Even though slim is in, the real attraction of the D900 is its multimedia feature set. Yet the D900 is also chock-full of basic features, such as a 1,000-entry phone book that can hold five phone numbers, an e-mail address, and a note per entry. For caller ID, you can assign a group IP, one of 25 polyphonic ring tones, and a picture. The SGH-D900 supports MP3 ring tones as well, which you can download from your carrier or upload from an existing MP3 collection. Other basic features include: text and multimedia messaging; e-mail; a speakerphone; a vibrate mode; Bluetooth; voice recording; a wireless Web browser; an alarm clock; a calendar; a memo pad; a world clock; a calculator; a currency and unit converter; a timer; and a stopwatch. There's also a TV-out feature that lets you view the photos and videos on your phone on a television screen, as long as you have a connecting cable. The SGH-D900 is a quad-band world phone with EDGE support.

We were very pleased with the 3.0-megapixel camera. Not only are the images excellent, but also we really like the camera's user interface. All of the buttons on the keypad--even alphanumeric keys--can be used as shortcuts to adjust camera settings on the fly. The D900 comes with a plethora of camera settings. They include: image size (2,048x1,536, 1,600x1,200, 1,280x1,024, 1,024x768, 800x600, 640x480, 320x240, 240x320, and 240x180); image quality (superfine, fine, normal); viewfinder mode (full screen or standard ratio); exposure metering; white balance; eight preset color effects; 30 picture frames; a flash; a self timer; ISO settings; zoom; brightness; and a focus mode (pan focus or auto focus). You can also choose from five different shutter sounds, or silence the shutter altogether. The camera can also shoot video, with settings such as: recording length (normal, for multimedia messaging, or for email); video resolution (352x288, 320x240, 176x144, 128x96); quality (economy, superfine, fine, normal); viewfinder mode; audio recording (on/off); white balance; scenery (normal or night time); zoom; and brightness. For both the camera and video recorder, you can toggle the zoom and brightness sounds on or off. While we weren't terribly impressed with the video quality, it was still much better than many camera phone videos we've seen.

The D900 also comes with a music player. While there aren't any external music controls, you can use the four-way toggle and middle OK key to play music. The phone supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, and eAAC+ file formats. Music can be uploaded via the MicroSD card, plus the phone has 80MB of internal memory. We liked that there are shuffle and repeat settings, as well as four preset equalizer settings. When the music player is on, you can set it to override other phone sounds. The music pauses, however, when there's an incoming call.

There are certainly a lot of options when it comes to personalizing the phone. Not only can you download additional wallpaper, screen savers, and ring tones, but also you can change a greeting message, set it for auto-key answer (pressing any key answers the phone), set auto redial, or customize the My Menu option with all your favorite shortcuts, easily accessible from the default display. You can choose different sounds for message alerts, slider tones, ring tones, keypad tones, power on/off tones, connection tones, and call alerts.

We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; EDGE) Samsung SGH-D900 world phone in San Francisco using T-Mobile service. Calls sounded crisp and clear, with sound quality that matched a landline phone call. Callers reported the same with us. Speakerphone quality was also great. MP3 playback didn't compare to that of a dedicated MP3 player, but for a quick listen, it performed admirably. We paired the D900 with the Jabra BT125 Bluetooth headset and experienced no problems.

The Samsung SGH-D900 has a rated talk time of 6.5 hours and an impressive tested talk time of 7 hours. It has a rated standby time of 10.8 days. According to the FCC radiation tests, the SGH-D900 has a digital SAR rating of 1.04 watts per kilogram.