To compound that, after having transferred six albums the phone managed to group five of them together under 'unknown artist' and 'unknown album', while the sixth ended up with a seemingly random running order. Thankfully, simply dragging the files across from our iTunes library to the phone in Windows Explorer worked just fine with all albums appearing in the right place, in the right order and in a timely manner.

Angular

The rest of the F210's specification is par for the course: tri-band GSM/GPRS/Edge, a two-megapixel camera sans flash but with 352 × 288 (CIF) video, an RDS-enabled FM radio, Bluetooth with A2DP wireless stereo, T9 predictive text, all the usual mini applications such as a world clock, universal converter, alarm, stopwatch, calender, a couple of Java games, a song identification application and a WAP 2.0/xHTML web browser, the latter being of rather limited use on the diddy screen.

Battery life is nothing to complain about, an upshot of not having much screen acreage to power. We got a good four days usage out of it before it needed a charge and reckon that Samsung's claims of 265 hours standby and 200 minutes of talk-time are probably not far off the mark.

Verdict

As a youth-targeted music player-cum-phone, the F210 has a lot a going for it: good looks, clever design, quality construction, a decent raft of on-board functions, great sounding music playback and that clever clip-on headphones/lanyard rig. It's just a shame the screen is a bit on the small side for those of us more advanced in years.