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Samsung SLM Cell Phone Review - Software

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 17, 2007 Comment on this






OS (3.5)

The Samsung SLM runs the standard Samsung proprietary operating system. We find this OS to be fairly straightforward but it does have its bad points. We found the menus on the phone to be too large and reliant upon sub menu systems too much. This is true for both the program launcher menu and the menus that you bring up via soft keys inside of programs. That being said the operating system is fairly easy to use, especially if you don't venture too deep. We score proprietary operating systems on a one to five scale, saving higher scores for the more powerful "smart" operating systems like Windows Mobile or Symbian.

Home Screen Score (5.0)

The Samsung SLM's home screen is pretty typical. Across the top you have indicators for battery, signal strength and alerts. Below this is another band of indicators with things like time and date. At the bottom of the screen are the labels for the soft keys. There are also shortcuts that are accessible via the D-Pad from the home screen. By default these are assigned to new SMS, my stuff, instant messaging and contacts. These can all be re-assigned via the settings. The wallpaper for the home screen can also be changed. All in all it's what we expect from any regular phone.

Extensibility (3.0)
The Samsung SLM does not support native third party applications. Like most phones it can use java applications like Opera Mini or Google Maps. This gives users some options, but not as many as you would have with a smart phone like the T-Mobile Shadow.

Customizability (2.0)
The Samsung SLM doesn't provide you with many customization options. There's no support for themes, but you can change the background image of the home screen. You can't change the font size or type for anything but the dialer screen. You can also choose to have the application menu appear as a grid or a list. We've seen better from other devices, especially smart phones like the T-Mobile Shadow, but even regular phones like the Sony Ericsson W580i offer support for things like themes.

OS Responsivness (8.0)
The Samsung SLM is a very responsive handset. Almost all the programs and menus launch quickly and without lag. If you ask for a menu it comes up immediately. This is in stark contrast to the LG Venus, which could be very laggy. We appreciate responsiveness in our devices as no one likes to wait while their phone does what they want it to do, and the Samsung SLM won't make you wait.

Browser Features (8.0)
The Samsung SLM's web browser is pretty standard fare for a mobile browser. It supports both mobile WAP pages as well as standard HTML pages. Javascript is supported, as are images, cookies and encryption. More advanced features like Java, Flash, RSS and password management are not on board. You can save images or entire web pages to your phone, a feature not often seen on cell phones. There are very few web browsers that support more features so we're pretty happy with the Samsung SLM's browser features.

Browsing Interface (3.0)


The browser interface on the Samsung SLM is a little confusing. By default web pages are shown in full desktop mode, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling to get around. You can switch to a "smart-fit" view that tries to rearrange the content so that it fits in a single screen width. Unlike most phones that try to give you a more desktop-like browsing experience the Samsung SLM lacks any kind of overview mode so you can quickly move around and zoom in on the content you want. Instead they have a zoom feature that allows you to zoom in and out of a page, but this is clunky and when zoomed out is of very limited utility. The point is you should probably stick to the "smart-fit" view as the desktop view is a poor implementation.


The favorites and browser history on the Samsung SLM are both very simple lists. This might be sufficient for a browser history but we feel like your favorites should give you more controls with things like support for folders. The browser menus are no better, with the right soft key assigned to the "back" function they packed than fourteen menu items into the left soft key menu, and some of them have sub menus. This is a problem that's endemic of the interface, as we pointed out above, but it's taken to an extreme in the browser. To make things worse functions that you would want to access a lot like entering a URL are the hardest to get to.

A combination of a poorly thought out menu system and poorly implemented desktop view make this a rather poor example of a mobile browser. We would have preferred that they stick with a more simple interface that did less better rather than try to do more and mess it up so badly. We understand that competition in the mobile browser space is heating up with Safari on the iPhone and Web on Series 60 devices setting the new standard, but this is a poor response to those excellent mobile browsers. We recommend that anyone who needs to do serious browsing on the Samsung SLM go out and get Opera Mini, which is miles ahead of the built in browser.

Browser Access (6.67)
To see how easy it is to open a web site we count the number of steps it takes to go from phone closed until we have our own website up on the device. We use steps instead of a timed test here because we don't want network issues to get in the way. Entering the URL is counted as a single step. The Samsung SLM took six steps to browse to our site, which is pretty good. The Samsung SLM is helped out by the fact that the center select button on the home screen takes you directly to the browser. From there we just hit the left soft key to open the menu, hit nine to select the enter URL option, type in the website and hit enter again. As you can see below only the W580i did better in this test than the Samsung SLM.

Cell Phone Steps Score
Samsung SLM 6 6.67
Razr2 V8 6 6.67
LG Venus 10 4.00
T-Mobile Shadow 8 5.00
Sony Ericsson W580i 5 8.00
Helio Fin 6 6.67

Gaming (2.0)

An unfortunate trend we've seen on mobile devices is that many of them now ship without even a single full-version game. This is the case with the Samsung SLM, which has several demonstration games on board, but you'll have to pay to play them for more than a little while. We feel that every mobile device should ship with at least one halfway decent game to help kill some time. There is a good selection of games available for download as the Samsung SLM will play most java based games, but it isn't as great as the large library of games available for smart phones like the T-Mobile Shadow. The controls of the Samsung SLM are not very good for games either. The small and flat D-Pad will be prone to mistaken presses, especially in an action game where you have to react quickly.

Calculator (4.0)

The Samsung SLM has a simple calculator on board that allows you to do arithmetic functions. There's no support for more advanced functions like exponents or percentages. There's also a tip calculator on board that can be helpful, but in no way should you expect to be able to figure out any advanced mathematical formulas on the Samsung SLM.

Alarm (8.0)

We were very happy with the alarm functionality on the Samsung SLM. You can create multiple alarms, one of which is called the wake-up alarm. In reality there's no difference and every single on allows you to set a custom ring tone and complex recurrence pattern. You even have the option to have the phone turned on when an alarm goes off, ensuring that you don't miss it even if you've powered the phone down, a very nice feature.

Document Software (0.0)
The Samsung SLM doesn't include any software to view or edit office files like Word and Excel documents.

Other Software (0.0)
There is no additional software that we feel is worth any extra points.


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