Samsung Adidas F110 miCoach personal trainer phone

The miCoach's two-megapixel camera isn’t one of Samsung’s top class shooters. It’s a standard-issue snapper without any flash illumination or autofocus control.

The camera can take decent enough snaps in good lighting conditions, although the amount of detail you can get in images is limited. Colour rendition is pretty good, and generally vibrant. We noticed some exposure issues in trickier lighting conditions, and the camera sometimes struggles with indoors shots, deteriorating further in low light conditions. It’s an average sort of performance, in short. Video capture too is quite average, shooting at 176 x 144 pixels maximum resolution.

Drop and give me twenty

The miCoach uses Access' NetFront Browser 3.4, which offers a reasonable mobile internet experience for a non-3G device. You can get full page or mobile-tailored "Smart-fit" page views, and a page pilot function gives you an overview of pages to help navigate your way around. But some media rich pages don’t load well and are slow to render.

The miCoach coaching software is impressive, but for most of the time your phone is likely to revert to its main role as a call maker and taker. Here, the performance is no-nonsense, with solid and reliable reception and call quality. No complaints at all in our tests. Samsung’s estimated battery life figures – up to 2.5 hours of talktime, 250 hours of standby time or ten hours of music playback – are lower than you’d expect for a non-3G handset.

However, we found that with average usage, with a small amount of music listening – but with a couple of coaching runs - the phone kept going for around two-and-a-half to three days between charges. Using the music player more, when you’re running for example, will reduce those figures accordingly.

Verdict

The Samsung Adidas F110 miCoach phone is very much a niche mobile. Its miCoach personal coaching system is impressive for a fitness application designed for a mainstream consumer gadget. Both on the phone and synced to the miCoach website, it offers a sophisticated experience that could get you fit and keep you on track. Its music player is a good performer, and is well integrated with the miCoach software. Its 1GB storage, however, is limited compared to what you can get on many music player and mobiles that can use memory cards.