Samsung Monte Slider E2550

After announcing an affordable but superbly upscale Monte S5620 touchscreen to the delight of mobile phone enthusiasts, the leading Korean mobile phone maker Samsung unleashed a new line of affordable budget feature phones carrying the Monte name thereby creating a Monte range similar to its Shark range.

One of them is the Samsung Monte Slider E2550 which, as the name suggest is a slider version but this time, the feature set is nowhere near the S5620. Apart form inheriting much of thecosmetic façade of the S5620, the Monte Slider is everything that the S5620 is not. There's no 3G, no WiFi and is not even a quad band so you have limited coverage on the planet, not that we expect its users to be rich enough to travel a lot.

This is definitely not for the gadget lover and techno geeks. Its 2-inch display is even smaller than that on the Shark 3, less than half the internal memory and an imaging prowess that's a throwback to late 90s.

Affordability at its Lowest

We know that budget phones have the most compromised feature set. But for a 21st century handset, the Monte slider scrapes the bottom and if it were discovered 20 years from now and still working, historians might classify it as a 20th century artifact rather than a 21st century one.

But let there be no mistake, this is a fairly capable handset on its own though we would think that daddy Monte S5620 would not want to site beside it and would rather disown it. So what can prospective buyers of the Monte Slider expect?

First off, it's just a 2G mobile phone on the dual band GMS/GPRS (900/1800). It sports a slider form factor body that measures 98.5 x 48.5 x 14.4 mm and weighs in at a mere 85.5 g. There's local data connectivity support for Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for your wireless and wired data synching needs. There's a very rudimentary imaging with 1.3 megapixel camera that Samsung must have taken from old camera phones in its unsold 7-year old inventories. It features fixed focusing with QCIF video recording at 15fps. Your pictures taken from it would display nicely on a matching 3-inch TFT LCD display with 256k colors and QVGA resolution The Monte Slider takes a nod at multimedia with the usual media players we expect from a Samsung and even comes with remarkable stereo FM radio with RDS that can do broadcast FM recording. You get the DNSe (Dynamic Natural Sound engine) sound enhancing facility it shares with the Mote S5620. There's a speaker phone but no 3.5mm headphone jack. You do get Bluetooth A2DP but you need to buy Bluetooth stereo earphones.

We didn't realize that they still make handsets with an antediluvian 12 MB phone memory until now, though itsphonebook supports up to 1,000 entries with photocall. At least you still get a microSD expansion slot for up to 8 GB. A standard 800 mAh Li-Ion battery power the handset for up to 6.6 hours of talk time and 16 days of standby time when charged to the max.

On the software front, the Samsung Monte Slider E2550 claims to have socially aware with social networking tools that enable live updates to your favorite social network site Facebook. It also comes with WAP 2.0 xHTML web browser for surfing though we can't really recommend surfing the net from a 2-inch screen at GPRS speeds.