Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani

The specialty of the Samsung M7500 is the Emporio Armani branding of the phone. It is said that the design of the M7500 phone was created by Armani himself. It gets a classic look from its attractively lit up sides. There’s an “Emporio Armani” logo and colored stripes on the sides of the phone and they are illuminated by three colors, depending on the current theme or user preference. The Samsung M7500 was made of high-end plastic materials that were carefully choosen to avoid fingerprints. The phone’s light at 90 grams. The feel of the Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani is nothing short of class. The M7500 has an even surface and keys are hard and responsive. The side-keys present (hardware music controls, volume rocker, and camera key) are also lighted. The UI and the attractive LED-lit sides enhance the overall user experience to be a pleasant one.

Samsung intended the M7500 to be a fashionable music phone; however, looking at the price it sells we are disappointed with its features. The Emporio Armani phone offers nothing outstanding in terms of features found on modern music phones. Worth mention is the SHAZAM music recognition feature which lets you identify a song by sending a recorded clip to a server. The dedicated music hotkey and a 3.5mm audio jack were thoughtfully placed on the side. Music library functions present on the M7500 were good and the phone can playback almost any popular sound format. The Samsung M7500 has a 3.0 megapixel camera (without Flash) that takes great pictures in well-lit environments, and a secondary video calling camera. The display of the M7500 is a QVGA 262K color screen made of OLED technology. The phone is lacking in the PIM features, with a limited 1000 phonebook entries and 500 text messages. The E-mail client was surprisingly easy to configure with popular e-mail accounts. There’s 120 MB of inbuilt memory on the Samsung M7500 and the Emporio Armani phone can take up microSD cards up to currently available 16GB capacity. An MPEG4 player, and FM Radio with RDS add to the multimedia front of the M7500. The Office documents viewer and Java MIDP 2.1 were valuable additions. The bundled Netfront browser had presented us with a superior browsing experience.

Connectivity was also sacrificed a bit on the Samsung M7500. The M7500 is a Quadband GSM device that functions on 850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands with EDGE class 12 support. Single-band 3G is present (2100 MHz) with support for HSDPA 2100. For local connectivity the Samsung M7500 supports Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP but lacks Wi-Fi. The USB 2.0 connector allows using the phone as a mass storage device.

The Samsung M7500 is powered by a 960mAh Li-ion battery that gives it a strong 540-hour standby or 7.5 hour talk time on GSM. On 3G it delivers over 4 hours of talk time and 290 hours of standby. We must say, very good performance for a slim phone with a moderate battery.

We were honestly disappointed in this respect. Albeit being costly, the Emporio Armani lacks some major features that are taken for granted on modern phones. This could be excused because Samsung targeted people that needed another classy phone to flaunt. However Samsung must note that not many people prefer class over features.