Imaging at its Best with the New Samsung S5560 Marvel

Samsung has just found another niche for causal camera phone lovers with the new Samsung S5560 Marvel. At a mere ₤30 on a 12 month contract with Orange, you can have a high end camera feature commonly found in flagship smartphones. It's a 5.0 megapixel autofocus camera with LED Flash with image stabilization and smile detection.

While video recording is supported, not much is revealed in terms of frame rate and resolution. But the high end imaging capability should make the budget-conscious market rejoice this Christmas. Admittedly, Samsung pushed back a bit in going all the way to make this a flagship phone, and preferred to design it around more practical terms outside of it camera features.

Practical Features

Giving the S5560 an affordable price tag means some sacrifices alright. For starters, there's no 3G or high speed data connectivity. That means you have to content yourself surfing the net with just GSM/GPRS/EDGE speeds on the 2G network. You can still use the phone anywhere on earth since it's a quad band GSM. If it's any consolation, you get WiFi 802.11 b/g which will still give your high speed internet over hotspots across the nation. You also get Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR for wireless data transfers.

A 3" display doesn't qualify as a practical design feature but it can be if you use a more modest resistive touchscreen and a color depth of just 256k colors. That's what Samsung designers did for the S5560. You get a large 3-inch QVGA screen when it could have supported a higher resolution, deeper 16 million colors and a more appropriate capacitive touchscreen, but in the interest of keeping the cost down, it seems Samsung imparted its expansive screen with practical features instead. Not to fret though, you still get a capable accelerometer that automatically gives you portrait or landscape viewing with the tilt of the handset.

Its 960 mAh lithium ion battery is typical for slim handsets but Samsung was able to squeeze in a generous 9.5 hours of talk time and 620 hours on standby on a single charge. Not bad when slim handsets typically just peak at around 6 hours of talk time. There's microSD memory expansion support for up to 16GB on a modest 76MB of internal memory - another cost cutting features to bring down its price.

The handset won't be complete with the nod to multimedia functions and the S5560 doesn't disappoint as it has the right media players for all your video, audio and photo files having the popular formats. You also get a stereo FM radio with RDS. You can enjoy more headphone choices to listen to with its Bluetooth A2DP support for wireless stereo earphones or high fidelity headphones using its industry-standard 3.5mm jack.

Conclusion

Unless you like to surf and you can't live without high speed 3G, then look elsewhere. Otherwise, for most people who prefer to surf at home on their desktops but would like the ability to get the best photos from their handsets without breaking their banks, the Samsung S5560 has a clear advantage over its rivals in the same price point.

To find the best Samsung S5560 deals you can look at Moby1 who compare all the latest phone deals for the S5560 and many other phones, and they also have many informative phone reviews.