Samsung Solid Immerse review

Samsung Solid Immerse review: Contacts and calling

While it's perfectly legitimate to say that some handsets marginalise making calls in favour of other features, the Samsung Solid Immerse puts contacts and calling at its core.

The right soft Menu button is hardwired into your contacts, which are drawn from the SIM and internal memory. A search box at the head of the screen lets you rifle through them.

There are tabbed menus in the contacts area and you can skip quickly to groups and favourites.

Adding new contacts to the Samsung Solid Immerse is easy, via a two-stage approach. Vertically scrolling through the Contacts screen you can enter first and last names, mobile and landline numbers, a separate video call number and email address. You can also assign the new contact to a group, give them a personalised ringtone and link to their image, as well as adding their company and job title.

Stage two comes into play if you hit the left softkey. Now you can add a whole new bunch of info including nicknames, more phone numbers, web addresses and so on.

You'll note in that lot we mentioned video calling. It is supported, but only works one way as there's no front-facing camera on the Samsung Solid Immerse itself.

Calling is all very straightforward. However there's no smart dialling, so that if you're on the main screen and start tapping out either a number or the letters of someone's name, you don't get any help in narrowing down who you are trying to call.

Call quality is good and there's a noise cancelling feature which claims to allow people to hear you even when, according to the Samsung website, you're near a construction site or roaring waterfall. Samsung is clearly trying to tell us that its Solid Immerse is as good for builders as it is for tough travellers.

Being neither, we were only able to try it on a busy main road and with the radio turned up indoors. It's OK, but cupping a hand over the mouthpiece helped too.