Samsung GT-E2550 2" 87.7g Black - mobile phones (Single SIM, Alarm clock, Calculator, Calendar, Converter, Countdown timer, Stopwatch, To-do list, Polyphonic, 128 x 160 pixels, 262144 colours, Negative film, Sepia)

Product Information

We'd advise those interested in the Monte to glance over at its stablemate, the Genio Slide. It's got a touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, which alleviates at least some of the control issues we have.

You’ll be asked to confirm this a couple of times, so using the same buttons select ‘yes’ until the process begins. If your phone has both a power button and a Bixby button (like the Samsung Galaxy S10) then you should press the volume up, power and Bixby buttons all at the same time, and hold them until you feel a vibration, then release them. Problems also arise once you fire-up the built-in music player. You can’t browse through your music by album or artist, only as a complete list of songs or using playlists. These can be made on-the-fly, but it’s no replacement for a proper navigation system. On the inside the Monte features a brand new incarnation of Samsung’s innovative TouchWiz interface, version ‘2.0 Plus’ to be precise, that allows for even more customisation than before. An update of TouchWiz 2.0 (the system that appeared on the Jet and Omnia HD), this latest instalment discards the strip of widgets on the left hand side of the home screen and instead arranges them in a scrollable channel along the bottom. This channel only appears when you tap a button at the top left of the screen.You can choose 'Media player' for easily getting images into a photo library application, 'Samsung Kies' for connecting to Samsung's desktop client, or 'Mass storage' to get the microSD to appear as an external drive on the computer. The keys are flat, almost level with the display and not very big, but they’re comfortable enough to use. The mic pinhole is located further down below the keys. Fingerprints are another unfortunate effect of the glossy plastic. Every finger to have touched the S5620 Monte is clearly and horribly visible. The Samsung S5620 Monte comes with the three essential items – a compact charger, a data cable and a one-piece 3.5mm headset. In the box, you’ll find manuals and software too, of course.

The Monte’s range of connectivity options is rather good by mid-range phone standards as it supports HSDPA at speeds of up to 3.6Mbit/s as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.

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Some of the options, like the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, have pointlessly flashy interfaces that not only make it harder to see what's going on, but just mask more sensible list options anyway. You can't help but feel Samsung would have been better off just focussing on getting the touchscreen working. The Monte's 3G connection tended to be nice and fast, though browsing speed over Wi-Fi connectivity was hampered by the sluggish software. The camera is surprisingly good for a modest 3.2-megapixel affair. The key to this is a fast shutter speed. There's no lag, and therefore no motion blur, which many camera phones suffer from. The impressively sharp images from the Sports mode really demonstrate the good job Samsung has done here.

With your phone switched off, you now have to boot it into the recovery menu, which means switching it on with a specific button combination. Okay, we’re coming off a bit too negative – the S5620 Monte isn’t the most attractive Samsung touchphone but it beats the S5230 Star. It’s just that the orange accents made the phone much sharper.

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There are three hardware buttons below the display - Call and End keys obviously and the center button. The center button brings up the main menu or toggles between the active app (if there is one) and the main menu. The exact combination will depend on which Samsung phone you have, but with most of Samsung’s more recent phones – and specifically any Samsung phone that only has volume buttons and a side button – you should press volume up and the side button until you feel a vibration and see the Samsung logo, then release them. And although the phone’s camera is a tad basic, it takes reasonably good snaps. It has a bog standard 3.2-megapixel resolution and doesn’t have an LED flash, but Samsung’s camera software is better than most and includes some neat features. For example, there’s a face detection mode as well as ‘smile shot’ where it’ll wait for the person in the frame to smile before taking the snap. You can also geotag photos thanks to the onboard GPS chip. Outdoor shots look reasonably good as colours are nice and vivid, but photos captured indoors under low light tend to come out quite grainy. The phone has a front-facing camera for video-calling on 3G networks, too. Indeed, this is the final nail for the Monte. It's not the worst phone in the world, but there are much better phones available, even from the same manufacturer.