Samsung Galaxy Europa

Editor's Review of the Galaxy Europa

The Samsung Galaxy Europa or Samsung I5500 Corby Smartphone is a quad band mobile phone that works on just about any network available: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 making it operational in just about any country.

Announced in June 2010, this handset measures 108 mm long by 56 mm across by 12.3 mm thick, truly a handy and portable handset that you could easily hold in your hands or put away in your pocket or bag. It is also more lightweight than other handsets of its size at only 102 grams.

A 2.8 inch capacitive touch screen gets prominent real estate at the front. The sensitive screen is capable of displaying up to 256,000 colours at a resolution of 240 by 320 pixels. The I5500 also has an accelerometer sensor that automatically rotates your Touch Wiz v 3.0 user interface. The TouchWiz user interface allows you to personalise your phone's home screens

Basically adhering to the Corby's sleek and elegant styling, the I5500 looks like an updated Samsung Lindy. It uses black plastic that is glossed over providing that expensive and classy look. The layout is also similar to other Android phones with the send and end buttons below the display along with the 5-way D-Pad and navigational buttons.

This mobile phone comes with 170 megabytes of internal memory, enough to handle unlimited phone book entries and call records. If that is not enough, you can pop in a microSD card into its card slot for additional memory of up to 16 gigabytes. You would certainly need this additional memory to store all your photos, H.263, H.264, MP4 video files and MP3, eAAC+, MP3 audio files. The handset also comes with a stereo FM radio tuner, and comes with a speaker phone and a 3.5 mm audio jack to give you a choice on how you want to listen to your music.

The Galaxy Europa comes with a 2 megapixel camera that captures pictures with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. The camera has geotagging and video capture functionality.

Internet connectivity is available. The Galaxy Europa allows you to get on any class 10 GPRS and EDGE networks. It also gives you the flexibility of a wireless 802.11 b/g connection and the speed of HSDPA 7.2 megabytes per second connection. Further connectivity is provided by the handset's Bluetooth v2.1 compatibility and microUSB port.

Like most smart phones coming out lately, the Europa also focuses on enabling the user to easily access and update social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. On top of that, it easily interfaces with Google Search, G-Mail, YouTube and Google Maps. It should be noted that this handset features GPS support, adding more functionality to the Google Maps interface.

This should come as no surprise because the I5500 Galaxy Europa Smartphone is powered by a 600 megahertz processor running Google's Android Eclair. The open source operating system allows the South Korean electronics company to cut the cost of the Galaxy Europa while limiting the trade-offs in features. This is, by the way, the first Corby phone that runs on Android.

Lastly, the lithium ion 1200 mAh battery gives you up to 9.5 hours of talk time and up to 521 hours on a 2G network.

Limitations

At its price range, people would be amazed at what the Samsung Galaxy Europa has, instead of what it lacks. The list of features we would miss on this handset is quite short: a better camera, a flash for its camera, a higher resolution for its display and a bigger touch screen. But really, this is quite an awesome handset that has more features packed in for its price.