Sascha Segan Samsung SGH-X820 The Samsung SGH-X820 raises the bar for beauty and brains on a high-end GSM handset.
The thinnest phone in the world. Excellent Bluetooth capabilities. Many powerful functions.
No memory card slot. Battery life could be better. Sold only through independent retailers.
The Samsung SGH-X820 raises the bar for beauty and brains on a high-end GSM handset.
As the world's thinnest phone, the Samsung SGH-X820 is an amazing device: It is as good at making calls and surfing the Web as it is at turning heads. It makes the Motorola SLVR L7 look like a brick, and puts other thin phones to shame with its 2-megapixel camera and elegant, fun interface. The super-slim profile means you must forgo a memory card slot, and the battery life is on the low side for a GSM phone. The coup de grace: It's available only through independent retailers.
At 0.3 inches thick (by 1.9 inches wide and 4.4 inches tall) and only 2.2 ounces, the X820 is nearly two-dimensional. Turn it on its side, and it disappears. Yes, it's wide and flat, but so are almost all thin phones. The keys are comfortable and well spaced, and the 176-by-220 screen is unusually sharp and bright, readable in even blazing sunlight. Watch out for the unpleasant visual effects of sweat and face grease on the matte-black surface, though.
Samsung has crammed a seemingly impossible amount of gadgetry into a device as thin as a stack of four quarters. They topped it off with a gorgeous, usable interface, with bold icons and clear words. Like most phones, the X820's interface has a main menu of icons leading to submenus, but there's something about the shading and animation of its menus that's just rightneither as droningly dull as Verizon's interface nor as over-the-top-whimsical as those on some other Samsungs.
This isn't a true smartphone, but it's pretty darn close. The built-in music player handles AAC, MP3, and even WMA files and sends them over stereo Bluetooth to wireless headphonesyes, stereo Bluetooth! The built-in POP3/IMAP e-mail client, though desperately slow at loading large mailboxes, handles up to five e-mail accounts. A built-in attachment viewer reads JPEGs, music files, and even Microsoft Office and PDF attachments of up to 300KB in their full graphical glory. Opera Mini runs like a charm. And did I mention the 2MP camera?
As a phone, the X820 is surprisingly good. Sound quality is very sharp, with a touch of an annoying high-pitched harmonic at times. The speakerphone is improbably loud, as are MP3/AAC/WMA ringtones, and the vibrating motor is quite vibrant indeed. Transmission sounds a bit robotic, but perfectly audible. The phone has no voice dialing, unfortunately. Reception is adequate; not up to Nokia levels, but neither is this the deeply troubled VK Mobile VK2020.
You have to sacrifice a few things for such thinness. The phone has a whopping 80MB of memory, but no memory card slot. And the battery life could be better. The X820's 6.5 hours of continuous talk time is on the low side for a GSM phone (though it's better than that of the Nokia N80, and the phone definitely needed to be recharged every other day or so. In that way it reminded me of Samsung's also-thin, also-popular MM-A900 for Sprint.
Outdoor shots taken with the X820's flashless 2MP camera are a touch dim, but very well balanced and sharp. The images, unlike those from a lot of other camera phones, don't wash out in the foreground when there's a bright background. The camcorder mode captures clear 15-frames-per-second videos at 352-by-288. But like other high-end Samsung phones, it struggles with blur indoors.
Make sure you have Bluetooth on your PC if you want to connect to this phone, as it doesn't come with a USB cable (with nonstandard sockets)and I have no idea where to get one. (The X820 also has a TV-out function that I couldn't test because it requires a similarly mysterious cable.) Bluetooth connectivity is just plain great, though. You can transfer files, print to Bluetooth printers, sync your contacts, calendar and tasks with Microsoft Outlook using Samsung's free PC Studio 3 application and use the X820 as an EDGE modem at respectable speeds. I got speeds from 85Kbps to 134 Kbps connecting to the Internet on T-Mobile's network. Mac users will be a little disappointed, as there's no way to sync contacts with a Mac, though they can still use the phone for dial-up networking.
The Samsung SGH-X820 simply shames other thin phones. Motorola's SLVR L7 has iTunes going for it, but that's about it. And if VK Mobile's VK2020 is a mentally challenged supermodel, the X820 is Brooke Shields with her Ivy League degree.
As a tri-band foreign phone, the X820 works best on T-Mobile because it lacks the 850-MHz band that Cingular relies on in some parts of the U.S. It's being sold right now by dynamism.com, a reliable independent retailer, for $449 unlocked. That's the only thing preventing it from getting an Editors' Choice award, which we restrict to phones being sold either directly through their manufacturers or by carriers. But I think the price is a deal for a phone this thin, this smart, and this beautiful.
Compare the Samsung SGH-X820 with several other mobile phones, side by side.
Bottom Line: The Samsung SGH-X820 raises the bar for beauty and brains on a high-end GSM handset.