Samsung F400

The basics

Samsung F400 is a mobile phone from Samsung that has great music features. The dual slide enables external speakers to play music and its navigation is through an iPod-looking MusicWheel. It has a 3.15 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, it weighs about 105 grams and measures 103.2 x 48.2 x 16.9 mm.

The good

Like the Queen, music phones are popular but unsexy (no disrespect your Majesty). But not the stylish and elegant F400. It boasts a dual-slider action - slip it one way to reveal the keypad, slide it the other to display a front-facing speaker. Don't panic, this speaker's been engineered by the hi-fi heroes at Bang & Olufsen, and blasts out powerful, dynamic tunes without the usual distortion problems. Elsewhere, the iPod-esque scroll wheel provides easy menu navigation, HSDPA gives fast 3G downloads, and a 3.2-megapixel camera takes pretty decent snaps.

The bad

Although this looks stylish, it is a bit chunky around the midriff. Also there's no significant amount of integrated storage space for your music collection, so you have to fork out extra for a microSD card. That said it does support 8GB cards - so you'll be able to carry around 2,000 decent quality tracks on it.

The bottom line

Employing Bang & Olufsen to create the built-in speaker was a masterstroke. Throw in bullet-speed 3G Internet skills and 3.2-megapixel camera, and you've got a great music phone with some impressive all-rounder talents in tow.