The Samsung Genio Touch
Exclusive to Vodafone for the first month
Samsung’s new smartphone-on- a-budget the Genio Slide has been launched on Vodafone.
Aimed at young professionals, the phone has a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a 2.8 inch touchscreen.
From the press release:
“The Genio Slide features a slide out landscape QWERTY keyboard as well as a full-touch screen, giving people the best of both worlds.”
“The QWERTY keyboard slides neatly underneath the handset, so the phone can be used as a full touch screen device, and when users want the keyboard they can simply slide it out and turn the phone horizontally.”
So, there’s no accelerometer/ g-sensor but on the plus side there are three customisable home screens with the widgets that we’re used to seeing on other Samsung models such as the Jet, with support for Facebook, the BBC iPlayer, e-mail, Twitter etc.
Like the Jet, the Genio Slide uses quirky on-screen gestures for some functions such as custom zooming in and out of web pages.
There’s a 3.2 megapixel camera with “Smile Shot” and panorama function, and joy of joys, a 3.5mm headphone jack (sadly amiss in many older Samsung handsets).
Its vital statistics run to 105 x 56.9 x 15.68 mm, so the Genio Slide is a chunky little beastie, and like its older sibling, the plain old Genio, comes with three interchangeable covers to suit your whims.
On board memory is 120 MB but there’s also an SD card slot that can accommodate cards of up to 16GB in size; plenty of room for your musical needs.
Budget touchscreen smartphones are becoming increasingly common, but Samsung makes a good job of these handsets so the Genio Slide is worth a look if you’re considering upgrading but can’t stretch to the iPhones or N900s of this world.
The Genio Slide will be exclusive to Vodafone for the first month of release, free on contracts from £15 per month, and will be arriving on other networks thereafter.
I have the Genio Slide and am very impressed with it! I really wanted the iphone but due to cost had to look elsewhere and came up with this. Of course this phone can’t touch the iphone but I’m happy to have it as an alternative. I would’ve like a better camera on the phone but this is adequate for most needs, apart from missing a flash option that is. The widgets are great and have had no problems searching on Google, so far anyway. I would recommend this phone to anyone, even if most reports say it’s aimed at the younger generation, which sadly a category I now longer fall in!