Samsung SGH-P300: A phone calculated to please

Leave it to Samsung, and the demands of the ever-expanding cellular phone market, to come up with new variations on the wheel. Most cellphones now come with a variety of high-tech features – cameras, camcorders, Bluetooth, WAP and MP3 players. What most cellular makers have come to realize is, no one phone is great for everything. At least for now, there’s only so much memory capable of being packed into a sturdy unit that, at the very least, has to provide reliable, high-quality cellular connections.

So each new phone plays up one big feature: for some, it’s the fancy camera, with zoom and digital effects. Others emphasize the large giga-space allotted to MP3s, doubling as a music player.

But have you ever wished you had a calculator that doubled as a cellphone? No? That’s probably because you already have a calculator on your cellphone. But that hasn’t stopped Samsung from coming out with sleek, ultra-slim cellphone model that looks like a calculator. At a nano-thin 8.9 millimeters wide, it has to be the least imposing cellphone out on the market. But it is very sharp-looking. With its edgy silver and black design, it looks like the latest in cellphone technology. Place it on a desk, and it could easily pass for a high-tech calculator. It even has a big face to display your phone numbers and sums – useful in spots where you don’t want to squint.

It’s so thin, in fact, that I became concerned that I would lose it or break it if it traveled in my pocket. Fortunately, the SGH-P300 comes with a leather carrying pouch that doubles as a battery – it keeps the thing at least partially charged for longer, with a flip-top to protect the face. (Samsung sent me a German user’s manual, by the way. Do I sprechen sie Deutsch? Nein. So I wasn’t able to figure out how to lock the thing, along with many other vital functions.)

Its smallness, actually, makes it an unlikely design for a cellphone. As one user showed me, the mouthpiece barely reached from his ear to the end of his sideburn. People might feel less than confident talking into a phone that’s the size of playing card. But that’s technology for you: they will build it, because they can. Function must now follow form in the ever-growing thicket of cellphone models.

I wanted to love this phone, but my technological limitations often prevented me. Also my fingers: I found the digits even smaller and less manageable than on my old Nokia. As a phone, it has the same keypad layout as other Samsung models, which, to me, is frustratingly counterintuitive. Suffice to say, I don’t like to hit three or four keys just to send or delete a message. Simplicity is still best.

I’m sure Ethan Hunt (of the Mission: Impossible movies) or 007 have never had this problem with gadgets: they just grab the latest widget being offered by Q, fiddle around with a few buttons, and off they go. They’re never struggling desperately to find the "receive" button or locate punctuation for a text message while stuck along EDSA. But this is the real world.

As for the phone’s other functions, they are familiar to Samsung users. It has a 1.3-megapixel camera that can take night shots, with zoom and flash and all the other bells and whistles; the camcorder is 353x288 pixels with a 1.8-inch screen, but lacks real audio. It has a WAP browser. It has Java. It has Bluetooth. It has voice recognition and voice dialing. It has a 1,000-number phonebook capacity. It has a memo book, a scheduler, a countdown timer and a stopwatch. And it works fine as a calculator, too (once you figure it out).

The speakerphone is readily available with a push of the thumb (I stumbled upon it accidentally), also useful in driving situations. Like most up-to-date models, this Samsung has a foreign currency converter, as well as a converter for lengths, weights and temperatures. I found this helpful. I also liked the World Time function that allows you to pan across a digital globe, on which the current time of most world cities is displayed.

All this for about $400, according to the Internet. Samsung has penetrated the Philippine market with its sharp and clever phones, becoming (according to Samsung) number 2 here behind Nokia. If you want a slim, sleek, card-sized cellphone that will catch your friends’ interest at the restaurant table and make them want to pick it up and play with it, this is a good one. The Samsung SGH-P300 makes for a splendid conversation piece, if only for its hip, compact design.

(Now all I need to do is learn German.)