The latest Corby CDMA has moved a notch ahead for providing a user with TV viewing capability. Coming to the form factor, it continues to have the same looks & design of its predecessors. The Corby TV has a 2.8 inch touch screen with three buttons under it, – calling, back & call-end/power. On the left side of the handset, we have volume rocker & a multipurpose port for charging, headphone & USB. Right of the handset we have the screen lock & camera buttons. It has an inbuilt camera at the back of the handset of 2.0-megapixel. Corby TV has a headset connector with a 3.5mm jack which lets us use the headset of any choice apart from the proprietary headset jack of the phone. It has the same Touch Wiz UI which the first Corby had, but it has been renamed as Youth UI. Although with the above features the touch feature still has to be improved further. The one-touch widgets which are on the side panel of screen are very fun & easy to use, as they always used to be. Finally the QWERTY keypad has been added, but as it is not useable in the landscape mode its benefit remains limited. There is not much change in the music player interface, but TV channel interface is additionally been added. This interface is very simple & though it doesn’t have the option of pausing the streaming, but it can be tapped by the stop button for bringing the show to an end, which can be again tapped to resume. But, using the TV interface takes its toll on the battery power by draining all the battery juice. It has 4 buttons on its screen – previous, stop/play, next & full screen.

TV & More

Corby TV has lots of social networking apps like Twitter, YouTube, & Facebook. Striking feature of the phone is the TV app which is powered by Mobile TV which features a lists of interesting and entertaining an informative channels like –NDTV Hindi, FTV, Aaj Tak, Cartoon Network, CNBC Awaaz, BBC, Bolly Theater, CNN, Mobile, NDTV Imagine, India News, ETV, Headlines Today, CNN IBN, ESPN Hollywood movies, etc. All the above channels have been & stored in order of streaming and all contents are downsized to fit in the mobile screen. However the picture quality is not superior as it might have been expected. The display contents are are sometimes pixelated & often blurry because of high level of compression. Moreover we can see that not many changes have been made in the music player interface, apart from addition of a TV channel interface in the phone. This newly added interface is actually very simple & we don’t have an option for pausing any streaming, but we can use the stop button on tapping which will bring the show to an end, & tapping it again could make it resume again from the beginning. The most important and best feature is the music playback & sound quality which is really good. We have an option for categorising our list of songs by album, artist or genre. Genre option could also be sub categorised into pop & electro lounge. Its sound effects include EQ settings like jazz, rock, live & classic. The FM signal reception is also good, but has no additional features. When we consider the 2.0-megapixel camera we would notice that still capture clarity is really good. It also has some shooting modes one could play with –like single shot, multi shots (9 shots), mosaic & frame shot, few scene modes are also present which enables us to take pictures in the landscape mode, night shot mode, dawn & sunset. Its video recorder features the same settings, with a change of recording with a resolution of 176×144.

Connected Always!

It has a very good connectivity, but when using the Corby TV, in time its network gets disconnected. Its data transfer speed is very fast with its very good Bluetooth and GPRS connectivity. Corby TV also has the feature of being used as a dialup modem. Email set-up is very simple and supports popular Email clients such as POP3, IMAP4 & SMTP. The battery performance could have been improved, especially while running of the TV feature. When tested of using the TV with full charged up battery, it lasted just about an hour of streaming & switching between channels. So it won’t have enough juice for even switching through the channels. SO without any doubt, a little stronger battery pack could have done wonders to the handset. It also has the option of an expandable memory which supports up to 8GB by micro SD.

Samsung Corby TV Price & Alternates

Samsung Corby TV price in India – Rs.9000

Samsung Corby TV price in US      -  $190 USD

Samsung Corby TV price in UK     -   £ 130

Corby TV has been priced at Rs. 9,000 ($190)approx. Unless one wants TV functionality in their phone one could go for Corby CDMA that costs around Rs. 10,400.