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The sunflower is slightly out of focus but I was about 6-inches from the subject and so stretching the phone for this shot. Colour reproduction is superb. The small apples were shot against a grey sky. The lens coped well here and both foreground and background have a fair amount of detail. It was quite windy when the outdoor shots were taken, and I was pleased to see no blurring or evidence of shutter lag.

Music playback delivered reasonable sound quality. Samsung provides a two-piece headset with a proprietary connector at the handset and a 3.5mm connector just past the handsfree microphone. There is just 128MB of internal memory, but my review sample came from Orange with a 1GB microSD card, which is quite a memory boost.
The phone will sync with Windows Media Player, and you get the required cable. The internal battery gave me 8 hours 3 minutes of life, but playback stopped after 5 hours 56 minutes.

The phone comes with a flip style case that incorporates a second battery and is designed so you can use the phone with either of its sides facing the front. Should you wish to use this you’ll get longer life, but it does add considerable bulk to what is a svelte handset. I’m not convinced that the added size is a price worth paying for longer battery life in this instance.

Other features not already mentioned include a wap browser. You can enter URLs using the phone side, but thankfully the display defaults to the music player side. Other applications include a calendar, to do list, alarm, timer and currency converter.
The SGH-F300 is a clever concept, and in some respects it is well executed. The build quality is superb and Samsung has certainly achieved a great deal by bringing two device fronts together in a single unit. However, the integration is not as complete as it could be – why is there no way of viewing calendar data on the larger screen, for example? And I found the sweeping system on the music player side very irritating.

Verdict

When rating this phone I wanted to be able to give extra marks for chutzpah, but in the end it is practical real world factors that rule the ratings system here at TrustedReviews.

After the initial wow factor I found the SGH-F300 a somewhat frustrating handset and on balance would rather stick with separate phone and music player. The small screen lets the phone side down while the sweeping touch system does the same for the multimedia side.

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