Myhphone – Mobile Phone Info Center

Whether a trend or marketing purpose, Samsung seem launched only one Armani branded phone each year. The first was the P520 Armani at 2007, second goes to the M7500 Emporio Armani at 2008, and for the third year is this Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani.  However, unlike the previous Armani phone which were only ordinary high-end device, the B7620 is come with more functionality as it is running the Windows Mobile 6.5 OS.  This handset also come with a Qwerty keypad, make it more like a  business smartphone than a fashion icon.

Design

Samsung B7620 Armani has a side-slider form factor design so you will see a touchscreen display on the front panel and a full Qwerty keypad underneath it. The display has a size of  3.5 inches and is AMOLED powered with the resolution 800 x 480 pixels. The keypad  is arranged in four rows with enough space between them. It is large and quite easy to use. The slide mechanism is like the HTC Touch Pro2 where you can  tilt up the screen in about 45 degrees after you slide out the keypad. Of course, you still can leave the screen remains in flat position if you like. The B7620 Armani was covered by smooth plastic casing that colored in black and gold: gold color is on the back cover and the perimeter on the front, rest of them are in black color. The use of the color make the device look so elegant and pricey which is make sense enough as it is Armani branded.  The overall size is measures at 118.5 x 58.3 x 16.4 mm and the weight of 164 g. Apparently it is not a small nor slim device that you can fit in your pocket easily.

User Interface

Samsung B7620 Armani was running the latest Window Mobile 6.5 OS. Likewise, the original UI was covered by it own popular TouchWIZ UI. It is the latest version UI but probably not much differences with the previous one. On the homescreen you still can see a list of widgets lying on the left vertically, and at the the middle also got a horizontal list of icons as well. Also it remains the five separate screens panel main menu where you can place applications of your own choosing. For every programs that installed in the device, you can create a shortcuts for them and put it on the menu that you prefer. When you open the slider, the interface automatically turn in landscape mode and leading you to message inbox, emails, calendar, notes and searches panel. All these make easy for you to work with the Qwerty keypad. In a nutshell, if you familiar with the previous TouchWiz interface, you definitely has no problem on this device at all, After all it is quite easy to handle.

Music and Video

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani has it own multimedia player namely TouchPlayer instead the Window Media Player.  The player can handle both music and video files. For music playback it can play most of the popular music format such as MP3, WAV, e-AAC+, WMA, and AMR files. As for video concerns, the supported format are including MP4, 3gp, H.263, H.264 and of course the DivX and Xvid files are also played without a hitch.  Since it got a huge AMOLED display, so it is really nice to watch videos on the device.

Camera

There is a 5MP camera included in Samsung B7620 Armani. It features autofocus, LED flash and Geo-tagging and delivers rich functionality with options like face and smile detection, white balance, multitude of effects, ISO sensitivity setting and loads of presets. Video also can be recorded at 30fps in VGA format. And the captured  images and video clips on the handset can easily be edited,  thanks with the Armani phone offering an onboard photo/video editor.

Conclusion

The Samsung B7620 Giorgio Armani reminds me the Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO, not only they have the similar name but also similarity hardware and software which is a good thing. It’s mean the B7620 is specs-wise and got a lot of excellent features. If put aside the Armani name, the B7620 just another high-end smartphone from Samsung. So if you not a Giorgio Armani fans, then you can just go for other Samsung device like B7610 OmniaPro or B7300 OmniaLITE, after all they are cheaper.