Smartphone Thoughts: Plugged In with the Samsung i320 Smartphone

Figure 4: On the back of the device is the 1.3 Megapixel camera with flash, and stereo speakers.

The speakers on the i320 are pretty decent. While the sound quality is nowhere near the
Figure 5: Behind the battery door you'll find a nice clean layout with nothing hidden under the battery.

Under the battery cover you'll find unobstructed access to the SIM card. Unfortunately that's not the case with the microSD card. While it's not underneath the battery, like so many other Windows Mobile devices, it does require the removal of the battery to successfully insert or remove the card. It's not a deal breaker for the device, but it would have been nice if it could have been built to allow a memory card to be swapped without powering down the device.

Now we've come around to the battery. In my opinion the battery life is the single worst thing about this device. It's not really the battery's fault either. The battery is rated as a 1000mAh. For comparison, the HTC Tornado is rated as 1150mAh, the T-Mobile Dash is just 960mAh, and the Motorola Q is 1130mAh (Standard) and 1640mAh (Extended). Both the Tornado and Dash have significantly longer lasting batteries and the Q seems to be about the same life as the Samsung i320. So this isn't a battery size problem. My only thought is that Samsung didn't spend any time optimizing Windows Mobile to ensure happiness and longevity of use. According to Samsungs product page, the i320 is good for 3.3 hours of talk time and 140 hours in standby mode. I'm pretty sure the 3.3 hours of talk time is right. I don't know about the 140 hours of standby. On average a fully charged battery will last me anywhere from 20-30 hours. If I do a lot of talking or data then it's closer to 20. If I don't really use it much and it's goes about it's business doing email and data automatically then I'll get closer to 30 hours. If you're a heavy talker, then this could be the end of the line for you. It is within reason that someone could use up the battery in the middle of the day and be left swapping out. That is, if they remembered to bring the other battery along.


Figure 6: The spare battery comes with a handy little charge case. The light on the cable goes from red to green when the battery is fully charged.

While we're on the topic of power, it's worth noting that both the i320 and the Motorola Q have the same processor. They are both running an ARM920T PXA27x processor. Motorola claims to be getting 312Mhz out of this chip, but Samsung doesn't mention the speed of this processor anywhere. However, ARM and Wikipedia indicate that the processor should be around 250Mhz. Whatever the actual megahertz is, this device has a lot more pep than HTC's 200Mhz TI OMAP processors can pump out. It also has a lot less battery life, perhaps the two are somehow related.