The Samsung i780 is, at first glance, another Blackberry clone – in fact, no matter how often you glance, that’s pretty much what it remains. It does throw in some pretty impressive additional features including the rather useful mini touchpad tracker pad navigational thing and HSDPA support for lightning fast download and upload speeds. But, like many clones it looks the part and tries to impress, but it has some imperfections compared to the original.
The 2.5 inch display is touch-screen – much like the Blackberry line. The QWERTY keyboard could easily have been physically removed from a Blackberry. Yet, it doesn’t seem to manage these things quite as well as a Blackberry – it just hasn’t had the same amount of practice is probably the problem.
The touch pad is a stroke of genius though. Once you program your brain to forget looking for the little directional buttons, and get used to the tracker we’re fairly sure you’ll love it and you may even venture so far as to throw away the stylus (or at the very least, not use it when in public – people will think you’re a real Brain Trainer geek).
Battery life is pretty good, and the design is sleek. Compared to its predecessor, the i600 it’s come on in leaps and bounds. If you’re looking for an alternative to a Blackberry then you could do a lot worse than the Samsung, but in all honesty, you’d probably still be better off with the latest Blackberry handset (or buy an N95).