Samsung E790 (SGH-E790)

Available now
5th February 2007

The Samsung E790 is a lightweight clamshell phone weighing just 82 grams that comes with a 176x220 pixel display, a 2 megapixel camera and 80Mb of internal memory, expandable through the SGH-E790's microSD slot.

There are two important things to note about the SGH-E790 which aren't immediately obvious from the press photos. Firstly, it's a very glossy phone - the Samsung E790 looks similar to the Sony Ericsson Z610i or Motorola KRZR K1 in this respect. The other thing is that the external display is actually a monochrome panel, not the colour one seen in these press photos.

As ever, Samsung's seemingly random naming scheme gives little clue as to the exact specification of the E790, but here's a quick rundown: the SGH-E790 has a 262,000 colour TFT display (with 176x220 pixel resolution), an external 16 colour greyscale OLED panel (with 80x64 pixel resolution), the E790 is a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 device with GPRS and EDGE, plus it supports stereo Bluetooth and has a media player capable of playing back MP3, AAC and WMA audio plus MPEG4 and H.263 video. The internal memory should be good enough to fit at least one album's worth of high-quality audio.

There are a few drawbacks - the E790's video capture quality is a pretty poor 176x144 pixels @ 15 fps, and 176x220 pixel displays are a bit basic these days, but at least it keeps the weight and price down. The SGH-E790's strongest points are looks, weight, the camera and its multimedia capabilities.

The SGH-E790 is available now in certain countries, including Russia. News on wider availability is not known at this point.

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