Onlineways

The Samsung S5603 is an elegantly designed phone with a capacitive touchscreen.

Samsung makes its phone as simple to use as possible which makes it attractive to the older generation. Many elderly swear by Samsung phones and refuse to switch to a different manufacturer.

As important as user-friendliness is, there is always a danger of becoming overly simplistic in design and execution. So, there is always a balancing act to be done when it comes to designing an operating system. However, before we get into that discussion, we will start off with the aesthetics.

The S5603 has a simple yet stylish design. A Call, End Call and Back button are the only physical buttons on the front. Beyond that there are three other physical buttons on the side ­including the Lock key and Camera toggle key.

The back cover is made of a smooth hard plastic and is easily removable when you need to. What I do not particularly like is the fact that the charger port has a cover. Although this adds extra protection, it seems unnecessarily tedious for me to pop it out, slide it away and then insert the mini USB charger.

The highlight of this model is ­obviously the touchscreen. At first glance it looked really cool,  there is no stylus, therefore it is entirely finger ­driven.

This was really interesting and the success or failure of this model depends entirely on the ­functionality of the operating system.

S5603 is pretty straightforward to use. Everything is exactly where you expect it to be and finding your way around comes as second nature. The home screen is customisable and there is a side bar for speedy access to the applications.

At the bottom of the screen there are also shortcuts for accessing the main menu, phonebook and keypad. Navigating and surfing with this model is a breeze.

What you do not expect is that executing basic functions on this phone is not so simple after all. This is especially true when it comes to text messaging, arguably the most important part of any phone nowadays. After typing a long text message (which turned into two messages due to its length) this model asked me if I really wanted to send both messages. Only sarcasm comes to mind.

The speakers on this model are decent and listening to music on it is fun when I do not have my mp3 player with me. What I find comical about this model is that there is no way to turn off the keypad tones without putting it into silent mode. While texting, it sounds like I am recreating one of Mozart’s symphonies in digital tone, to the annoyance of everyone around me.

Meanwhile, the pictures turned out surprisingly well considering the camera is not top of the range. Running through the options is very easy and finger friendly. What is not so great is the picture viewer which uses motion sensing, so you only have to tilt the phone to go to the next picture.

However, it is overly simplistic in many areas and the processor is not as fast as it should which makes it a little sluggish at times.

In conclusion, this phone is very easy to use; it has good speakers coupled with its decent camera. On the other hand, with its sluggish command processing and it’s over simplification design, it may not attract some calibre of people.