Samsung S5620 Monte review: Well connected

Introduction

Affordable touch phones are all over the place so the Samsung S5620 Monte will have to win the old fashioned way – by giving more and better features. Done deal: with full-suit connectivity, the Monte aims to deliver great touch experience and social networking features plus some distinguishable styling.

Samsung S5620 official photos

The Samsung S5620 Monte has both 3G with HSDPA and Wi-Fi for browsing and data, and a built-in GPS receiver for location services. The Monte has a capable web browser (with Flash support) and a decently sized 3” screen. The GPS can also transform the Monte into a proper SatNav unit thanks to the free NaviExpert app. However, the free license is available for phones sold in the Czech Republic.

For the impatient readers, here’s a rundown of the Samsung S5620 specs – the good and bad of it.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/EDGE, UMTS 900/2100, HSDPA 3.6 Mbps
• 3" capacitive TFT touchscreen of WQVGA resolution, 256K colors
• TouchWiz 2.0 Plus user interface with multitasking support
• 200 MB onboard storage, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
• 3 megapixel camera with smile detection, QVGA video @ 15fps
• Secondary video-call camera
• Wi-Fi connectivity (b/g)
• GPS receiver with A-GPS; Free GPS navigation with NAVTEQ maps
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB v.2.0
• microUSB slot (with charging support)
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• DNSe sound enhancements
• Find Music recognition service
• FM radio with RDS
• Office document viewer
• Smart unlock
• Social networking integration with direct file uploads
• Accelerometer for auto screen rotate, turn to mute

Main disadvantages

• Free GPS navigation is for Czech Montes only
• No on-screen QWERTY keyboard
• Flash in browser eats too much RAM, can’t play YouTube videos
• No games preinstalled
• Task manager cannot be used for switching between apps

Samsung S5560 in our office

If you’ve read our preview you’d know the S5620 Monte was orange-on-grey back then. Samsung have obviously changed their mind since and put a tux on the Monte – it’s now grey on black – a bit more conservative.

The preview was written before the Samsung Bada OS came about but now that we’ve played with it too, we can do a better comparison. The Monte is a feature phone and Bada is a smart platform but in the end they both share the TouchWiz DNA. What that means is that the interface of both is pretty similarly – at least graphically.

So, we have the Samsung S5620 Monte back for a proper check-up. See what has changed and what stayed the same in hardware on the next page.