Review: Samsung D830

**Anilrgowda** · 05-Jan-2007, 01:44 AM

Phone rating:
At the time of launch (Summer 2006), the Samsung D830 is the world's slimmest clamshell phone, and is one of the trio of superslim Ultra phones from Samsung. The D830 has proven to be the least popular of the Ultra series, being outsold by the candy-bar-shaped Samsung X820 and the slide-design Samsung D900. This review will explain why.
The D830 really is slim - just 9.9 mm thick. Remember the phone that started the superslim trend - the Motorola RAZR? That was 13.9mm thick and was the slimmest phone of 2004! The D830 really is extraordinarily thin! It's very light too, at just 92g. One problem that the D830 shares with the Motorola RAZR is that it's quite a wide phone, so hard to fit in the hand comfortably. This makes it more of a man's phone.
Visually the D830 is quite stunning. It's arguably a better-looking phone that the D900. It's very, very black. The phone features a very small and discrete (black and white) external display and an ultra high resolution main display inside. The menu has a black background with white text. This complements the black colour of the phone really well and is both striking and easy to read. On the negative side, the keypad is probably the worst of the three Ultra series phones. It's a flat touch-sensitive keypad that lacks positive feedback and is quite slow to use, expecially for texting. This is one of the reasons for the failure of the D830 to sell in big numbers.
Deapite being ultra thin, the D830 is a fully featured phone with an excellent 2 megapixel camera (no flash though) and a video recorder. The main display, as noted, is extremely high quality with an ultra-high resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and 262,000 colours. The phone comes with a good music player that can support a very wide range of formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA. One nice feature is that the music player can play in the background, whilst other features are in use. The integrated speakerphone is loud enough, but the best audio quality is obtained with optional stereo headphones. Memory is plentiful, with 80 Mbytes of internal memory plus a microSD™ external memory card slot expandable to 1 Gbyte. Connectivity is via Bluetooth, USB and TV-Out (for viewing images or videos directly on a TV). The D830 also handles emails with an attachment viewer for Microsoft Office and PDF documents.
The D830 is a very attractive superslim phone, with a very good range of features. However, it is let down in three areas. Firstly the keypad is slow and unresponsive. Secondly, battery life is very poor. Thirdly, the camera has no flash. This is why we cannot recommend the D830, despite all of its fantastic features. Instead, we would recommend the Samsung D900 as a truly outstanding phone.

05-Jan-2007, 01:44 AM	#1 (permalink)
Anilrgowda Administrator Posts: 18,715 Join Date: Jan 2006 Rep Power: 10 IM:	Review: Samsung D830 Phone rating: At the time of launch (Summer 2006), the Samsung D830 is the world's slimmest clamshell phone, and is one of the trio of superslim Ultra phones from Samsung. The D830 has proven to be the least popular of the Ultra series, being outsold by the candy-bar-shaped Samsung X820 and the slide-design Samsung D900. This review will explain why. The D830 really is slim - just 9.9 mm thick. Remember the phone that started the superslim trend - the Motorola RAZR? That was 13.9mm thick and was the slimmest phone of 2004! The D830 really is extraordinarily thin! It's very light too, at just 92g. One problem that the D830 shares with the Motorola RAZR is that it's quite a wide phone, so hard to fit in the hand comfortably. This makes it more of a man's phone. Visually the D830 is quite stunning. It's arguably a better-looking phone that the D900. It's very, very black. The phone features a very small and discrete (black and white) external display and an ultra high resolution main display inside. The menu has a black background with white text. This complements the black colour of the phone really well and is both striking and easy to read. On the negative side, the keypad is probably the worst of the three Ultra series phones. It's a flat touch-sensitive keypad that lacks positive feedback and is quite slow to use, expecially for texting. This is one of the reasons for the failure of the D830 to sell in big numbers. Deapite being ultra thin, the D830 is a fully featured phone with an excellent 2 megapixel camera (no flash though) and a video recorder. The main display, as noted, is extremely high quality with an ultra-high resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and 262,000 colours. The phone comes with a good music player that can support a very wide range of formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA. One nice feature is that the music player can play in the background, whilst other features are in use. The integrated speakerphone is loud enough, but the best audio quality is obtained with optional stereo headphones. Memory is plentiful, with 80 Mbytes of internal memory plus a microSD™ external memory card slot expandable to 1 Gbyte. Connectivity is via Bluetooth, USB and TV-Out (for viewing images or videos directly on a TV). The D830 also handles emails with an attachment viewer for Microsoft Office and PDF documents. The D830 is a very attractive superslim phone, with a very good range of features. However, it is let down in three areas. Firstly the keypad is slow and unresponsive. Secondly, battery life is very poor. Thirdly, the camera has no flash. This is why we cannot recommend the D830, despite all of its fantastic features. Instead, we would recommend the Samsung D900 as a truly outstanding phone.

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