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With 1GB of internal storage plus Micro SD support for cards of up to 8GB, the music player on this phone has the scope to be a tidy runabout for your favourite tunes.

The player can be synced up to copy music from a PC using Windows Media Player 11, and tracks are organised into regular music categories, including one for podcasts. Tunes can also be copied over using Samsung PC Studio software, dragged and dropped in mass storage mode, or received via Bluetooth.

The music player puts in a satisfactory performance, with the supplied earphones sounding better than your average mobile phone boxed ear-gear. Samsung has once again included Bang & Olufsen ICEpower technology, but while it's good enough for a mobile, sound quality doesn’t quite match the performance of the best Walkman music phones or standalone music players.

Samsung U800

The 3Mp snapper isn’t one of Samsung’s more advanced shooters

Complementing the music player is an FM radio, which you can use with the earphone cable plugged in as an antenna. The side positioning of the connector though is unfortunate for pocket-sleekness, especially with the rest of the phone being so svelte.

The three-megapixel camera on the back panel of the U800 is a couple of millimetres proud of the smooth casing, though it isn’t an attention grabber in itself. An LED photolight sits next to the lens for low-light shooting, but the camera itself isn’t one of Samsung’s more advanced shooters. Autofocus is missing, so the fixed lens device offers point-and-shoot action rather than more sophisticated focusing. It flips into landscape mode for shooting. There are a spread of standard cameraphone settings, adjustments and effects you can tweak, including white balance and brightness, along with multi-shot and panorama modes, and various frames and colours.

But it’s a step down from the autofocus, face detection and so on you get with Samsung’s recent five-megapixel cameraphones. Still, the camera delivers reasonably good shots within its limitations. The lack of autofocus obviously limits the precision with which you can capture the shots you’re after, and there’s no close up macro shooing mode. But you can take some pleasant enough snaps.

The level of detail is typical for a three-megapixel shooter, though it seems to handle exposure, contrast and colour rendition particularly well for this grade of camera. Indoors, low-light shooting isn’t quite so good, and images can be soft despite the rather limited flash illumination. Video capture too is limited on this phone, shooting at a basic low quality 176 x 144 pixels resolution. Still, Samsung has enabled this phone for uploading of video clips and snaps to blogs and content sharing sites via an embedded Shozu application, should you wish to show off your images online.

Cloud based data management

Latest Comments

Yup, K800 still better - even if there's a free PS3 with a U800

K800 - xenon flash, fast auto-focussing, sturdy lens cover, stable software (though the last update removed the joystick from waking the screen)

K850 - too easy to smash the lens, silly controls, some report software niggles

C902 - LED flash (c'mon SE, should be xenon with Cybershot), many report software problems, battery life disappoints many as well - lots saying that they expected better after earlier handsets

U800 - nice look and feel but not a good camera, poorer battery life than K800 when in use, and even though T-Mobile briefly gave away an 80GB PS3 on the £40 contract it's still not enough to convince my better half to commit to it (though she liked the style - if they'd fitted a better camera it might have swayed the deal).

Still, overall the U800 is not bad - it's just the K800 still has the measure of it and many newer phones from all sorts of manufacturers.

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Phail

Utter garbage, anyone can see that. Its not a FruiteePhone (TM) so anyone who buys it is clearly a blinkered FruiteePhone (TM) hater, as this site so clearly is.

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Have sent it back because my Sony Ericssom K800 was better

Maybe it was the fact that it kept asking me if it was OK to proceed after each click of a link in Opera, or maybe I've just become too indoctrinated in to the ways of Sony Ericsson, or perhaps I'm just taking advantage of T-Mobile's 30 day free try before you decide promise, but this phone didn't do it for me.

Have tried the SE C902, and the K850 as well, but nothing has come close to my K800. Perhaps it's a sign of old age

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