Company:	Samsung
Website:	www.samsungusa.com
Price:	$99 with a 2 year contract through Cingular
Pros:
Eye-candy sturdy design, simple user-interface and rich color screen.
Cons:
No speakerphone. Lack of full mp3 music player despite mp3 ringtones support.
Score:	3.5

The SGH-P207 is one of the sleekest and snug phones you’ll find in the display window. The lacquered shell and chrome lining adds a touch of elegance that makes the Motorola Razr look like a left over limb from the Terminator. It fits nicely in the palm of your hand and the 176x220 high-resolution bright and animated screen is coupled with equally bold and finger-friendly keys.

The style element of this Samsung might hide the fact that the SGH-P207 is really a medium-end phone when it comes to functionality. It does not have a speaker-phone, nor is it equipped with the ever more prevalent Bluetooth technology, which will irritate phone users who want to use wireless compliant headsets or sync data effortlessly with their PDA or PC. While the phone is capable of playing mp3 ring tones (which you have to buy from your service provider.) An mp3 music player with an expansion memory slot would have been an interesting feature for this phone, as it would give the iPod a run for its money as a fashion accessory.

What features the SGH-P207 has work well. The sound quality is loud and crisp, although a little metallic compared to the Nokia lines. The camera takes bright and rich pictures which make it perfect for text messaging and emailing, but not quite for the mantelpiece. Like most camera-phones, you can also takes video snippets (30 seconds each) to continuously capture the essential moments in life. It has a memory bank of 15 MB for pictures, ring tones and video storage and an additional 5 MB for downloaded data from paid services. There is a useful voice recorder to ensure that our media-infested minds do not forget to prioritize important details in life. With Nokia setting the benchmark for intuitive user-interfaces and menus, Samsung has come a long way in bridging the gap. The SGH-P207 was not as frustrating to navigate as Motorola’s tedious menus, which are not always intuitive in terms of what the commands and configurations. Thankfully, the “select” or “previous menu” option are less ambiguous on the Samsung.

My favorite feature of the phone in terms of its ambition rather than its quality has to be the VoiceMode for dialing numbers and writing text messages. It is not only useful for a hostage or a shackled international spy, but also for making calls from the road. However, the NLP (natural language processing) technology as expected from a first time feature in a phone is unrefined and I found it difficult getting it to interpret my words into the correct name or number for dialing or text message entry. It defeats the purpose when most of the words you say need to be verified from a proposed list of words the phone thinks you said. The phone has a useful web browser that lets you browse most websites and check email, but difficulties do arise when viewing the more content rich sites due to the size of the screen. Depending on your provider, there are other information services including news, finance and sports to keep you up-to-date while you are on the road.

Even with its chrome-headed external antenna, this Samsung is sexy and visually seductive. It may not be recommended for heavy business users and technology enthusiasts, but it would be a great choice for chattering teenagers or casual cell-phone users.