Samsung D820. It's cool! It's hot!

There was a Samsung roadshow booth on Orchard Road yesterday (Friday). I strolled in during lunch time and was instantly captivated by the new D820. I had seen pictures of it and already loved it but once the very cute Samsung promoter put the sleek black slide phone into my hand, I was hooked.

It's actually not as small it seems to be. It's about 2cm longer than my D500 and about 1cm wider. But it's only about 1/2 as thick. It feels good in the hand. It's like the Motorola RAZR V3 but with the slide. Definitely high on the cool factor.

The screen is much more detailed than the D500. It's a very noticeable improvement. One of my major grouses with the D500 was it's tinny sounds. Unless you use those hideous built in ringtones, you practically can't hear the phone on the train or in a bus. I can't even hear it in a crowded restaurant. The D820 has dual speakers (true stereo) and seemed louder as I was getting more intoxicated looking at the promoter. I didn't get to bluetooth one of my MP3 ringtones from my D500 over to the D820 and conduct a good comparison. And I like the usb connector. Apparently using Samsung's Windows software provided, you can connect the phone directly to your PC. It'll be good if we can indeed drag & drop MP3s and 3GPs etc.

So, how is it? It's good. I'd get one that lunchtime if Samsung hadn't offered me a measly S$200 to trade in my D500. I paid S$600 for it exactly one year ago and I'm still stuck with a 12 months contract remaining.

One disappointment though is the D820's slide action. I find it more plasticky and stiffer compared to the D500. The D500's very slick slide action feels almost hydraulically assisted. The D820's is more scrape, not so much slide.

* 15.2mm thin
* 90g
* 1.3-megapixel camera, camcorder,
* MP3 player (MP3, AAC and AAC+ audio files)
* 70MB of built-in memory
* external MicroSD memory slot.
* 2.12-inch QVGA TFT screen with 262,000 colours.
* Bluetooth 2.0 support for faster wireless connectivity with Bluetooth stereo headset
* Video recording - H.263 and MPEG4 formats (353x288 resolution)
* sound recording in AMR and AAC formats
* direct output to TV
* Speaker phone function with dual speakers
* Mobile printing - Bluetooth and PictBridge
* E-mail, MMS and SyncML DS
* data kit, TV output cable and a 64MB MicroSD memory card.