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Korea’s leading mobile phone innovator Samsung has yet unveiled a couple of new budget handsets at the recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress riding on the mystique and superb promise of its S5620 Monte unveiled on the even of the event.  These are the Samsung Monte Slider E2440 and the Monte Bar C3200 which as their names clearly suggest, carry the slider and candybar form factors.

The Monte range is thus, launched, much like the Shark range was unveiled last month.  Both new handsets are pitched to a market that wants no-frills basic handsets at the bargain price points. The least feature rich of the two, the Monte Slider, scrapes the barrel as the barest of the bare handsets sharing none of its more stellar Monte S5620 dad except a cosmetic inheritance of its façade.

It would seem that, as the barest of the bare, Samsung just pasted the “Monte” name onto their disparate alphanumeric branding just so the mystique of the Monte name can rob off on them to elevate its presence among the teeming masses of budget phones n the market.

But unless we are misunderstood, the Monte Slider is a very capable utilitarian handset on its own and remain competitive among basic feature phones in the market.  That it takes some cursory nod to many features we’ve taken for granted in a feature phone is plainly a tribute to Samsung’s ability to understand its markets.  Only this time, those features get really bare.

Elementary Features

The Monte Slider couldn’t be more elementary than being a 2G on a dual band GSM/GPRS.  That’s really all you need for a market that won’t be traveling outside its borders so you won’t ever need a roaming-capable handset that a quad band can give.  There’s no 3G or WiFi since the market that can only afford this phone won’t afford a monthly data plan.  But local data synching is now basic and you get Bluetooth 2.1 and microUSB for wireless and wired connections.

With a slider body that measures 98.5 x 48.5 x 14.4 mm and weighs 85.5g, the Monte Slider can’t afford to be generous in the display area.  It may have the ergonomics of the Monte S5620 touchscreen but you only get 2-inch TFT LCD with QVGA resolution and 256k colors.

Imaging and multimedia no longer amount to being mere frills but have become staple features the market has long taken for granted in a mobile phone. Rather than take them out, Samsung retained them but stripped them to their barest essentials.  Hence, the Monte Slider imaging gets a rudimentary 1.3 megapixel fixed focus camera that is everything a camera phone had in the early part of the 21st century.

No autofocus and no LED but it comes with a 15fps QCIF video recording.  Multimedia takes a better turn with stereo FM and broadcast recording, Bluetooth A2DP for wireless stereo earphones and the DNSe (Dynamic Natural Sound engine) facility for enhancing the listening experience. There’s no 3.5mm headphone jack but you get a speakerphone.

Internal memory is often the first to get pared down on a mini or lite versions of larger more feature-rich mobile phones.  Here Samsung does the expected to the hilt leaving a nearly useless 12 MB phone memory on the Monte Slider.  But you still get a phonebook memory that can take in 1,000 entries with photocall facility as well as a microSD expansion slot for up to 8 GB of external memory.