Samsung SGH-D840: Elegance from day to evening

Black as sin, slim as a supermodel and sleek like a great cat – that was how Samsung’s tri-band SGH-D840 slider phone looked as it lounged seductively in its box. It held great promise as it sat there, whispering, "Charge me up."

If clothing is fashion and phones are accessories, this slider phone would jazz up even frayed old jeans and comfortably washed and worn t-shirts. It also adds cyber-style to that somber pinstripe suit and goes well with the gorgeous evening dress and stiletto heels you’ve been dying to show off.

Like a well-tailored little black dress, the SGH-D840 goes seamlessly from day to evening and adds elegance and style to one’s outfit. It is a phone that impresses without effort – it impresses just by being.

When driving, you needn’t bother with picking up – the SGH-D840 comes with built-in handsfree and auto-answer capabilities, so you can still do your chatting on the road within the bounds of the law.

The SGH-D840 has a standby time of 250 hours on a single, two-hour charge and talktime of two hours and 30 minutes.

Just 13 millimeters thick and 100 grams light, the SGH-D840 packs your conventional MMS, SMS and voice-call functions with a two-megapixel camera capable of taking video footage, Bluetooth capability, an MP3 music player and 81 megabytes of phone memory.

This phone’s relatively large memory allows users to store high-resolution photos, videos and music, as well as your contacts’ phone numbers, e-mail addresses, their photos and your notes about them.

If you are a pack rat and feel you need more space to store stuff, you can always use a microSD card, which goes into the phone’s side-mounted memory card slot.

Want to show off your videos? No problem, the phone comes with a video output function. Just jack in the phone’s USB to TV cable and you can share the footage you have captured with a much larger audience.

The SGH-D840 also comes with a voice recorder that can clearly pick up sound from three feet away and has a recording time of 60 minutes.

You can also rationalize your schedules and keep track of your meetings and special events using the phone’s programmable and customizable alarms.

When transferring data from your phone to your PC, you have two options: Bluetooth or data transfer by popping the microSD card from your phone and putting it into a card reader that will relay the data to your computer.

If you get this phone, you may want either a memory card-reader or a top-of-the-line PC with Bluetooth capability, but nobody said highly functional elegance would come cheap.

This phone is also special because of its skinniness, a rare thing when one looks at the slider phones available on the market now – though the trend for mobile phones now seems to be to trim the fat from the handsets.

Despite the SGH-D840’s thinness, its LCD display is large and beautifully packed with pixels, so the photos and video footages you take come alive, in vibrant color. When put on a television screen via the USB to TV cable, the videos and photos still retain their vibrancy – a feature that has great possibilities for corporate presentations and for showing one’s neighbors the family vacation videos taken with the SGH-D840.

While such color-saturation in a cellphone’s LCD display is a lovely thing, one expects no less of Samsung, known as one of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry’s best LCD screen manufacturers.

The large LCD screen also allows visually challenged users to view their text messages and contact names and numbers in larger fonts.

The phone’s controls are easy to intuit, a big plus for people who hate referring to user manuals (the manual for the SGH-D840 is about half an inch thick). Of course, the manual is very readable, so if you get lost, it’s there to put you back on track.

The keypad is matte black, the only color the phone comes in, and it is beautifully styled, so if your phone looks good shut, sliding it open will bring its beauty out in full force.

Passersby glance at the SGH-D840 when it is shut and come to a full stop and gape when it is open. They will definitely gape when they see the price tag on this baby: $599.99, as stated on the Internet, though some shopping sites may offer discounts for online purchases.

The music player is pure bliss and you can download music directly to the phone using Bluetooth or off the Internet using its web application protocol (WAP) feature. The sound quality is excellent and one can play anything from classical to pop to acid jazz to rock and use the built-in equalizer to customize his listening experience.

Audiophiles, however, would probably prefer the larger storage, in gigabytes, and better sound quality of other MP3 players available on the market.

However, no pure MP3 player gives its owners the ability to listen to music and send MMS and SMS while doing the air guitar to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s Smoke on the Water.

The SGH-D840’s music player comes with video functions as well, so you can have trance-mood graphics dancing onscreen as you jig to your favorite tunes – and you don’t have to squint to enjoy the "lightshow" either. Just don’t do this in public, where your phone can get swiped because its pulchritude is also a thief magnet.

If you want to go handsfree when listening to music or speaking on the phone, the SGH-D840 comes with a USB headset that jacks into the same slot you use for charging the phone and the headset comes with a clip for pinning the cord to your clothing and its own volume control.

When not using the headset, the music and voice sounds issue from the phone’s speaker and you can go to maximum volume without diminishing this phone’s excellent sound quality.

How loud can it get? Set the SGH-D840 top volume and you will fill a 15-square foot room with song – or the sound of your boss’ voice while on speakerphone.

Sound-wise, modulating music and voice volume from the handset is easy, with its side-mounted volume control buttons, which come in handy when drop-dead gorgeous specimens of humanity approach you while you are dancing and you want to hear what they have to say, yet let them know you are playing the hippest music from your equally gorgeous phone.

While the SGH-D840 is close to perfection, it is not perfect. It has what the Japanese would call a "spirit line" when referring to a work of art – flaws that show the craftsman or artist responsible for the magnum opus is human.

The two-megapixel photo capability is very generous, considering that most cellular handsets that are equipped with cameras max out at just over one megapixel.

However, as is the problem with most camera phones, taking candid shots is a tricky business because movement – on the part of the photographer or the subject of the shot – distorts the picture. Posed shots a la daguerreotype are still the best if using this phone’s camera.

The video function, while smooth and seamless, will still produce wobbly footage if the videographer’s hand shakes.

Also, the tabs that cover the USB port for the headset and charger and the SD card slot are handsome, but they require nails to pry open.

Once open, they are connected only by a thin strip of flexible plastic, so ill use, such as yanking, could destroy these protective tabs.

The battery cover has nail-breaking potential in a brand new handset and may require quite a bit of dexterity to master, so open it with care and don’t try to pry it open if you’ve just had a manicure. Have a nail file handy for repairing broken nails if you do.

When using Bluetooth or playing games on the SGH-D840, expect your battery to go kaput – this is true of Bluetooth and cellular phone batteries in general.

After sending five text messages, transferring three video, six photo and three MP3 files via Bluetooth, and playing one game for 10 minutes, the SGH-D840’s lithium-ion battery was totally drained, despite having been fully charged just an hour before.

All told, however, the SGH-D840 is sublime and elegant, and who cares about the spirit line? Beauty is, in this phone’s case, its own reason for being.