Samsung C3300 Champ

Editor's Review of the C3300 Champ

Released a month after its May 2010 announcement, the Samsung C3300K Champ is a handy handset that measures 96.3 mm long, 53.8 mm wide and 13 mm thick. At 80 grams, it is one of the lightest mobile phones available today, making it easy to hold while operating and easy to tuck away into your pocket or bag.

The Champ features a 2.4 inch resistive touch screen display that is capable of displaying up to 256k colours with resolutions of up to 240 x 320 pixels. It has an accelerometer sensor for automatically rotating the user interface.

The Champ comes in 4 different colours out of the box: deep black, sweet pink, chic white and espresso brown, letting you choose a colour that fits your personality. It also uses the TouchWiz 3.0 user interface that gives you the power to customise your home screen by letting you add or show widgets and mini-applications.

The Samsung Champ is a quad band phone that works on any GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 network, making it a perfect mobile phone to use for international roaming. While on the road, you can enjoy listening to music via a built-in stereo FM with RDS or you can play back your WMA, MP3, eAAC+ music files. The C3300 can also play back MP4 and H.263 videos. You also have the option to either listen through the speaker phone or with a 3.5 mm headset.

Internet connectivity is possible with any class 10 GPRS and class 10 EDGE networks. You can also transmit files to your desktop or laptop computer using the microUSB v2.0 port. Further, you can connect with other Bluetooth-enabled devices using the v2.1 Bluetooth adapter.

The Champ also sports a 1.3 megapixel camera that captures photos of up to 1280 x 1024 pixels in resolution and records QCIF videos at 15 frames per second.

This handset is aimed at the younger set, or those who are out looking for a cheaper yet functional mobile phone. However, even with its lower price, it allows you to easily get on and update your social networking accounts and browse WAP, HTML and xHTML Web pages. You also have 30 megabytes of internal memory in this phone that is sufficient for 1,000 phone book contacts and call logs. This could easily be augmented up to 8 gigabytes with a microSD card. You could also play games with your Samsung Champ, browse Web pages with Java MIDP 2.0, organise your life with the preloaded organiser.

Battery juice on a single charge can give you up 27 days of standby time and 12 hours of talk time.

Limitations

With capacitive touch screens offering a more responsive display, and with the lower costs associated with it, one has to wonder why mobile phone manufacturers still uses resistive touch screen. The Champ suffers from a less responsive screen, which leaves you pressing harder just for the phone to register your input.

The lack of high speed Internet connectivity is a sure put off for the Samsung Champ, limiting you to a top speed of 236.8 kilobytes per second. Plus, it is a budget phone that would not allow you to have wireless access.

On top of these, the Champ offers a basic camera with a low resolution and none of the features such as auto focus and geo-tagging. You also cannot use it to take photos at night or in low light conditions because of the absence of a LED flash.

Overall, however, the Samsung C3300K Champ is a budget phone that would appeal to the younger market and has the features that they care about.