Introduction

I am still keeping on my shelf a sealed, foiled, zero-minute Siemens ME45. It is a symbol of an era; firstly because it’s Siemens and secondly because it is heavy-duty. Back then I think there were the Nokia 6250 and Ericsson R310 on the market. There weren’t really other, massively produced phones; since then we have seen the 5500, but this was only a “sporty” model, it’s sturdiness existed mostly based on its looks.

Samsung M110 has officially debuted this year. This Korean giant has too entered amongst the manufacturers making heavy-duty phones. There is truly a demand for such handsets but it’s good to know that manufacturer still doesn’t provide warranty for the phone in case of drenching it, or dropping it from the sixth floor. Instead we get a bit more protection against water drops, fluffs and bumps and neither the Samsung M110 is a device that we can take with us to the shower.

Of course the handset we got from XXL GSM is a bit more resistant to everyday stress. But we shouldn’t’ expect it to survive everything. Maybe the Ericsson R310 was the last public phone to be harshly tested by the manufacturer before its launch and we can still see a few of these orange monsters in pockets of foremen or miners. The Samsung M110 is rather recommended for those who, because of their work, must take their phone with them everywhere and they don’t want to waste their time with thinking about where to put the phone while they’re repairing a service box in the ground.

Exterior

The M110 is a rare piece of ugliness. It’s a brick dressed in commando uniform of a horrible military green color, with a frighteningly entangled keypad and a display that resembles a firing port. It’s size and weight are not significant, even it’s 17.9 mm thickness is not an exceptional value and its 95 grams of weight is absolutely acceptable.

The heavy-dutiness manifests in the following: greenish, rubber-like casing; a little door at the data connector closable with snap-fastener; simple, robust plastics; rubbery keypad; back cover lockable with a screw. Hopefully the speaker above the display has some protection to, on a first glance that looks like the spot where the handset is the most vulnerable.

On the left side of the phone are the volume control buttons, the right side is smooth. On the bottom only a black plastic closes the phone, whose top looks the same. On the upper part of the back there is a grid resembling a speaker, and in the topmost part the VGA camera advertises its low resolution, accompanied by a flashlight.

The bottom part of the keypad is normal, the upper section is “enhanced” by a circle of serious size, but this construction rather looks like something very unnatural. Besides the standard call handling and function buttons there are two silver-colored keys giving some individuality: on the left side there is the button responsible for activating the loudspeaker, while on the right we can find the delete button, but this also turns on the auxiliary light near the camera if pressed long, so the M110 can be used as a common flashlight.

Basic functions

The display is quite tiny. With its 1.5 inches diagonal it is one of the smallest pieces from the competition and it is accompanied by a 128x128 pixel resolution, far-from-perfect CSTN picture quality. To put is simply we can say that this is Samsung’s worst display for mobile phones. We could start a philosophical debate about the question “is such a screen enough for a heavy-duty phone?”, but we should take into consideration that aforementioned Siemens ME45, in case of which the manufacturer packed its model, already successful in the middle category, into a stronger casing and this was the key to its success.

The menu system also shows ancient Samsung signs. Although they were tricky and drawn a BlackUI startup screen as background, but upon seeing the icons, one can find out that the menu is based on 2-3 year old stuff. Nine little drawings, unchangeable color scheme and all of the already known mindless Samsung ideas, like: the OK button takes us to the WAP, vibration and ringing doesn’t function at the same time and creation of new messages is started in T9 mode.

The phone book doesn’t know anything extra: it can store 500 names and lists the contents of the SIM and the internal memory at the same time. Contacts can have associated a maximum of five phone numbers, one email address, a note and one graphic, not even photos are allowed. Message handling works with text and multimedia contents, the latter have a size limit of 100 KB. The storage space is enough for 200 SMS messages and 2 MB of MMS messages. The keypad is not very bad, if we succeed in disabling predictive text entry we can type at a fine speed.

Organizer functions are at a basic level too. We have a month view calendar; one type of note can be taken. The alarm clock knows three time points, this can be configured individually as on which days of the week should they activate. The calculator is a basic one too; the offer includes a stopwatch, a countdown timer and a measure converter.

Camera and other

It would be an exaggeration to talk about multimedia, as in terms of music the phone equals a big zero. The only musical part is the FM radio, which functions with the enclosed stereo headphone. This headset is nothing special, so in means of style it doesn’t match the phone and the software lacks RDS functions. There is a small dictaphone, which can record while the free memory lasts (FYI this is 2 MB and cannot be extended) and that’s the end of the list of audio features.

We shouldn’t expect anything from the VGA resolution camera – and so we won’t be disappointed. Its exposure is fast, it can operate completely silent and that’s all of its qualities worth to mention. The auxiliary light is indeed only good as a torch. The pictures taken with the phone can be seen below.

Amongst other applications we can find one piece of Java game, called BubbleSmile and truly: we have to order smiling bubbles one atop the other to make them disappear. It is not a new game; it was present on many Korean models back in the time of Samsung D500. And such we have reviewed all functions of Samsung M110.

Data transfer, battery

The heavy-duty Samsung is capable of making GPRS connections, which is good for two things: MMS messages and WAP browsing. The latter can display maximum xHTML pages, provided that the size of those is not larger than the average. It is a surprise that there is Bluetooth support, taking into consideration everything mentioned so far I really didn’t expect such a hi-tech function. Its version number is only 1.2, but it is perfectly enough for transferring the pictures taken.

The phone’s greatest feature is to be looked for under the back cover. The 1000 mAh capacity Lithium-Ion battery does a great job. Thanks to the lame display and the basic level of all functions, the phone keeps running for 4-5 days with one charge, which is considered good in the current competition of phones.

Conclusion. The M110 is in fact the simplicity packed in a heavy-duty cover and spiced up with Bluetooth. Its price is obviously higher than of the phones with similar functions, but for now the Koreans can safely ask more money as there aren’t really any heavy-duty phones nowadays, and the Nokia 5140 has ran out. Though that is a better choice.

In any case I can only hope that manufacturers will recognize this shortage on the market again. The success of the Siemens ME45 can be repeated; just someone should be occupied in doing it with brains. Please make a heavy-duty handset that fulfills two conditions: it looks decent and has at least the actual mid-category functions.

Bog