Underneath the display is the famed Giorgio Armani branding, as well as the Talk and End/Power keys. The volume rocker and microSD card slot sits on the left spine, while a dedicated camera key, Hold key (which locks the screen from being accidentally activated), and charger/headset jack are on the right.
Features
Even though the Armani wowed us with its design, it doesn't really impress us in the features department. Sure, it has a megapixel camera and a neat music player, but these can be found in most other handsets. So, let's start with the basics. The Armani has a generous 1,000-entry address book, with room in each entry for five numbers, an e-mail address, a birth date, and notes. Each contact can be added to a caller group, or paired with a picture for caller ID or one of 14 polyphonic ringtones (it also supports MP3 ringtones). Other basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, an alarm clock (with five alarm settings), a calendar, a calculator, a world clock, a unit converter, a timer, and a stopwatch. More advanced users will like the voice memo recorder, the Web browser, stereo Bluetooth, e-mail support, as well as a document viewer that can handle Office documents and PDFs. There's no 3G support though, which is a bit of a downer for such a pricey phone.
One of the Armani's more impressive features is its music player. We like the clean and minimalist music player interface. You can adjust the volume and the tracks simply by swiping across the surface, which we thought was a pretty smart idea. The available options are almost iPod-like--you can play all the songs, recently played songs, and most played songs, and the songs are organized via albums, artists, genres, and composers. You can also create your own playlists. Music player settings include repeat and shuffle mode, five preset equalizer modes, and a 3D sound setting. You can also select to play the music in the background while you're surfing around other parts of the phone. You will see the currently playing track on the home screen when the music player is activated, complete with the album cover. Another nice feature is that you can transfer unprotected songs via e-mail or Bluetooth. The player supports MP3, AAC, and AAC+ file formats. The Armani has about 60MB of internal memory, but you can always add more storage via a microSD card.
The Armani has a decent 3.15-megapixel camera with quite a few settings. You can take photos in six resolutions (2,048x1,536; 1,600x1,200; 1,280x960; 800x600; 640x480; 320x240), three quality settings, four ISO settings, three exposure metering settings, eight scene modes, three shooting modes (single shot, multi shot, mosaic shot), and eight fun frames. Other camera options include shutter, zoom, and exposure sounds. It also has a built-in camcorder that can record up to four resolutions (352x288, 320x240, 176x44, 128x96), three color effects, five white balance settings, and many of the same options as the still camera. You can limit the recording time for multimedia messages, or for whatever amount the available memory can hold. Photo quality was rather disappointing for such a high megapixel camera. Even though details were sharp, we were eventually let down by the inaccurate color tone and somewhat overcast look to the images. Video quality was predictably grainy and jerky, but that's to be expected from a camera this small.
Personalization options are a tad limited with the Armani. It does come with a variety of included wallpaper and sounds, but there's not much you can do to download more via a carrier as with most U.S.-based phones. You can try to get them via third-party sources, though. The phone comes with only one game, a photo puzzle.
Performance
We tested the triband (GSM 900/1800/900) Samsung Armani in San Francisco using T-Mobile. Call quality was surprisingly good. Callers could hear us loud and clear and we heard them just fine as well. It was almost landline quality, as the voices came through very naturally. Speakerphone quality did not fare as well though, as callers had to ask us to speak up, and we thought they sounded slightly tinny. We managed to pair the Armani with the Nokia BH-902 Bluetooth headset successfully, but have yet to test it with a stereo headset.
Audio quality from the music player was fairly decent. Of course, the built-in speakers offered subpar sound, but we expect most people to use either the included headset or a stereo Bluetooth headset anyway. The Samsung Armani has a rated battery life of six hours of talk time and nine days of standby time. We were able to get 9.03 hours of talk time from the Armani.
What You'll Pay
- Set Price Alert
