Samsung F110 - 1 mile

Adidas miCoach

The range of fitness phones is quite small at the time being. So small that besides the subject of our current review, we can find only two other handsets worth to mention: Nokia 5500 and Sony Ericsson W710i. Samsung F110, however, highly outscores these two from the point of view of fitness features, since there lots of accessories in the pack and because sport functions were implemented with the help of Adidas.

Adidas already has a complex training planner, administrator and diagnostic system, called miCoach. An important element of miCoach is that users can register on Adidas’ website, created specially of this purpose, and keep track of their results. In order to create a perfect training program, this feature becomes an absolute necessity.

If we’re talking about creating and measuring a king of training programs with the help of some kind of electronics, than Nike is another sports manufacturer that we can mention. They wanted to offer similar experience with the help of iPod, although there are fewer functions. We have received Samsung F110 in its huge box for testing from XXL GSM.

The box

The packaging is very surprising as there are no Samsung labels on it, which is not specific at all of the Korean manufacturer. Instead of this, there are loads of miCoach labels, we can see running people here and there, so the whole stuff looked like a really unique product, I could hardly wait to open the box.

And I wasn’t disappointed. We can find three smaller packs inside the large brick. The phone is in a simple, white box, there is a USB cable, a headset made of two parts, a charger, a CD and a wristband are besides it. The longish pack has a heartbeat meter in it, while the smallest cube includes a step counter that can be fastened to our shoe. These two gadgets use unidirectional Bluetooth to communicate, so they have a simple pill battery, they don’t consume much.

The heartbeat meter band that can be fastened to the upper part of the body is water-resistant; one would have to take it under the shirt, so it measures the heartbeats. No problem if we sweat on it, and although the 2.4 GHz Bluetooth, which is very close to our heart, might make some people suspicious, but we shouldn’t have any problems with it, as it has a very weak signal. The small, shoe-mountable step counter can be fastened perfectly with shoelaces, and aren’t many sport shoes with Velcro anyway. I have fastened the small device on a Nike shoe, saying goodbye to brand priorities. All accessories are very high quality, the Adidas logo appears on all possible surfaces, we can really feel that they wanted to give a very well planned package to the customer.

F110 on the outside

I think it’s about time to start dealing with the handset too, since that’s what the site’s about anyway. F110 looks really cool, its black and white colors make it look pretty much different than other Samsung phones, its design is something similar to the G600’s. This is a slider too, made of a very light plastic; the whole phone weighs no more than 80 grams.

Under the display with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels we can find the jungle of navigation buttons, which have an interesting, rough surface, which doesn’t slip out of our hands, and it’s also unique. In the center of this we can see the OK button, which takes the poor user straight to the web browser from the standby screen (should I cry or should I laugh on this?), while there are seven buttons around the pitted controls. The upper two are the function keys you can see on every phone. Under them you can see miCoach’s hotkey on the left and the music player’s button on the right, while under the rugged controls there are the call handling and C keys.

After sliding the phone we can see the numeric keypad sitting inside a white frame, but I’m going to tell off the buttons now. They are of cheap plastic, the keys blend under our fingers, and even though their pressure point is not that bad, but I had the impression that the designers made some slap-dash work. On the left side of F110 the two volume control keys are placed (these are very good, pop out a bit from the side and are reticular), while on the right we can see the camera’s hotkey.

After taking off the rugged back, there’s no use looking for the memory card slot, as F110 is not expandable. In turn the internal memory is 1 GB large. On the back there is the 2 megapixel camera along with a mirror and a very small speaker (hmm?). Besides the buttons the whole phone is of the usual Samsung quality, I have nothing against it, although I’m a bit afraid that the very light case might break easily if I drop it.

Menu, basic functions

The menu has the same scheme as in G600, and I was very happy about it. Customizability is almost perfect (I’d just like the OK key not to take me where it does…), the phone has the new BlackUI system running on it, and we can find eight different color themes. The default background is still the unsurpassable dynamic one (that changes according to the country you’re in), the different screens slide on from the other, or can open up like doors. Pressing the up key from the standby screen takes us to our own menu, in which we can put what we want. There are profiles, the handset can ring and vibrate at the same time and this time we’re not limited to factory default SMS tones, we can use anything we want.

The phonebook can store 1000 contacts, and it has no extras (if I don’t take into account that in the Options menu there are 22 submenus), although I would have excepted that besides the name, phone, email, birthday, memo, picture and ringtone fields I could have entered the weight, fitness level and Cooper test results for my acquaintances.

Messaging has no surprises either. We can store 200 SMS messages, while multimedia and email messages 14 MB of memory. The latter one supports attachments, but F110 cannot display Office documents and PDF file, although lots of previous Samsung phones were capable of doing this with the help of Picsel Viewer. Text entry is a bit uncomfortable only because of the buttons, but it’s completely ok on the software side. The same is true about the calendar, where we can have 1000 entries, and at last we can put meetings, anniversaries, holidays, important notes and personal entries in any distribution we want. The software asks for relevant information at all types of entries. The alarm clock handles five time points, the world clock has a small map, the stopwatch has a lap time feature too, and in the converter we can convert all kinds of units. There is a to-do and notes list too, while the calculator has basic functions, but it still understands parentheses.

Multimedia

The 2 megapixel camera on the back has fixed focus. It is to be used in landscape mode, the menu has the usual Samsung options, we can set environmental themes, the ISO value, there are frames, effects, self-timer and image sequence is also supported. Recording videos is only possible at QCIF resolution, that’s quite weak. In the settings we can turn off exposure sound, we can set a default name for pictures and light metering mode can also be changed. Below you can see some photos, and even though F110 is not about the camera, the pictures are still quite good, although you shouldn’t bee keen on macro mode:

There are no big problems with music either. The headset, which can be taken apart, has an earpiece plug, which is of really high quality. If we don’t like it we can change it to any kind of headset we want. Although memory is not expandable, the 1 GB capacity will usually be more than enough to keep some albums while we go jogging. There is another interesting feature: we can set up a Motivational music, which goes off when the miCoach sees that our heartbeat shows a decreasing tendency when running. The player runs in the background as it has to, it groups tracks by ID3 tags and there are equalizer presets. We can also rate tracks with small stars, and just like other new Samsung phones, F110 also functions with two stereo Bluetooth headsets at the same time.

There is an FM radio, it’s not bad. On one hand this little 80 grams plastic box sounds quite good even on speaker, and on the other hand we can record music directly from the radio, in 64 kbit/s MP3 format. The size of the recording is limited only by the amount of free memory. Another new feature is that we can access our favorite radio stations directly from the music player, which is a great idea in my opinion and it was no big deal putting it in practice.

There are five games installed on the phone. Cannonball and Freekick are full version – but these are ancient games, they were first included on D500. Minigolf Las Vegas, Paris Hilton’s Diamond Quest (winner of “muhaha” category on its own) and Tetris Mania are only demo versions, who wants them, should buy them. Java applications can occupy a maximum space of 4 MB, which is quite dumb I think.

miCoach menu

We can access the miCoach menu by clickinh on the running man icon. We arrive at an interface that’s designed like a roundabout, and it has the following menus: music, pictures, calendar, settings, start, and trainings. The first two are quite self-explanatory, but the third doesn’t bring up the calendar that we can access from outside of the miCoach menu, but we can see a calendar designed specially for fitness events. It’s worth starting with settings; this is where we choose the measurement unit, than enter our birth date, weight and the maximum allowed pulse. If we’re done with that we can start the exercises.

The first step is to strap the heartbeat measurement belt on, and fasten the step counter on our shoe. After this there is an “assessment run”, which is absolutely necessary, as the software determines our current fitness level based on this. This – ladies and gentleman – is a 1.6 km run, and the application advises us to do it with a maximum effort. It’s a shame, but still useful, so I strapped everything on myself and started off, but only to turn back after half a kilometer, as the gadget on my shoe measured 40 meters, which meant that if the software wants me to run 1.6 kilometers, than based on this measure, that would mean a nice and tight half marathon. The little bastard even gives voice commands, based on the remaining distance.

If we somehow survived the assessment (and I hope that 500 meters were not recognized only because of my soft, almost rolling steps), then we can upload this data, after registration, to www.micoach.com, which pops up the following error message under Firefox: we’re currently lame, but you go on running.

After this the website calculates our training plan, based on what do we concentrate on (endurance, performance build, training for a race, losing weight, etc.) and loads it back to the phone’s miCoach calendar. From now on we can run wild, and in turn we get lots of information about our performance. On one hand the phone keeps a few pages long statistic about the covered distance, our steps, our heart rate (this is shown in color), and on the other hand we can create trainings for ourselves, where we can define our own limits (for example I wanted to burn 20 calories today, and to achieve it I had to run 4-5 rounds in the living room). When running, we only have to hit F110 twice to make it tell us our current position (how many meters and calories), so we don’t have to keep our eyes continuously on the screen during training. If the miCoach menu is active (so we’re training) than besides accepting incoming calls and listening to music we have to pause the exercise in order to access other functions.

Theoretically the phone itself has a motions sensor, so it can calculate the covered distance even without that thing on our shoes, but the gadget sitting on our feet can be much more precise than the phone strapped on our shoulder.

Data transfer, summary

F110 supports only GPRS and EDGE. The built-ion Netfront browser can display HTML pages and can break the page to screen size. Local connections are available via Bluetooth and USB 2.0, both function perfectly.

I can’t say anything bad or good about the battery. It takes it for three days as a normal phone, but of course it runs dead much faster if we use miCoach, even faster if we also listen to music while running.

Summary. Samsung F110 Adidas is not for the masses. It’s worth buying for those who take this fitness thing seriously. It’s a well planned system, there’s not much to improve in this topic, although if it had 3G, one could upload results to the website immediately, during the exercise, but I think this is quite enough. As for me, I think that if I’m going to change my lifestyle to something that involves lots of running, than I’m still good without such a device, but it sure must be a fun thing getting lost in the wave of statistics about calories, heart rates and steps. Who needs such a gadget, should ho and get one, but I advise them not to take the 280 EUR worth of money in change, as it will make their heart beat too fast.

Bog

Translated by Szaszati

Samsung F110 has been provided by XXL GSM.
The device can be bought at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.

Specifications

Samsung F110 Adidas
	General
	Technology	GSM
	Size	101.5 x 45 x 14.5 mm
	Weight	80 grams
	Available colors	Black
	Display
	Display diagonal	2”
	Display resolution	176 x 220 pixels
	Display type	TFT
	Number of colors	262 thousand
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	1000 entries
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	200 / 300 KB
	Internal memory	1024 MB
	Memory expandability	none
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	none / none
	IrDA / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	none
	USB	2.0
	Push-to-talk / RSS	none / none
	GPS receiver	none
	Basic functions
	Profiles	present
	Vibra function	present
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Voice calling / voice commands	none / none
	Sound recorder	present, from radio too
	Alarm clock	present, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Samsung BlackUI
	WAP / HTML browser	2.0 / present
	E-mail client	present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	present, MIDP 2.0
	Games	5
	Currency converter	present
	Extra software	Adidas miCoach
	Multimedia
	Main camera	2 megapixels, fixed focus
	Secondary camera	none
	Video recording	present (max. 176 x 144 pixels)
	Music player	present, runs in background too
	Equalizer	present
	FM radio	present
	Battery
	Main battery	800 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	n/a
	Talk time	n/a
	Other
	heartbeat meter, step counter