Samsung Corby PRO preview

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Ahead of the review, we get our hands on the Samsung Corby PRO, a slide-out Qwerty device for the young professional. Within the lifestyle-focused Corby series of phones from Samsung, the PRO is the one clad in the most serious-looking attire. Apparently aimed at the young professionals market, the PRO is a touchscreen device that also packs a slide-out Qwerty.

Of course, in doing this, the PRO places itself in direct competition with a handful of pretty strong devices, like the HTC G1 and the new Motorola Dext. However, the PRO uses Samsung’s proprietary Touchwiz OS rather than Android, as used in those phones.

Although less flexible, the PRO still lets you customise your three home screens fairly comprehensively, giving you up to 100 different widgets to choose from including obvious choices like clocks and Twitter feeds.

Having just come from testing out the relatively low-end Corby Genio, we were impressed with the responsiveness of the PRO’s navigation between these screens. There was no real lag, and unlike some other slide-out Qwerty phones, the PRO switched between landscape and portrait aspect ratios very quickly as the keyboard was slid in and out. Homescreen layouts are automatically reconfigured too.

While we imagine some widget arrangements might not look too comfortable when switched to landcape mode, it didn’t have any problems with the ones we tried out. In actual usage, the Qwerty didn’t perform too badly either. Although lacking that final click on button-presses, the basic mechanical movements of the keys was definite enough to leave you in no doubt as to whether the stroke had registered or not. There’s nothing worse than a Qwerty so soft that you have to keep your eyes glued to the screen to check whether you’re typing or not. Ok, so maybe world wars are worse, but it’s a close-run thing.

The PRO gets an extra step up the feature list ladder from the Corby Genio and TXT on the photographic, equipped with a 3.2-mega pixel camera instead of the mere 2-megapixel examples seen on those two. We’ll have to wait to get a Pro in for a proper examination to  see whether that extra mega pixel reaps rewards, but even so it’s really not going to turn any heads when we’re starting to see 12-mega pixel camera phones seep onto the market.

This is the problem for the Corby PRO – while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the phone, it’s got stiff competition. The further you tread up the Corby range, the less influence its colourful backplate aesthetics will have. After all, how cheap can a touchscreen phone with a full Qwerty be?

This may well prove to be the sticking point for this top end Corby model. If it manages to undercut its rivals, the PRO may well be a smash. If its price is level-pegging with phones like the Motorola Dext, we can’t imagine the Corby’s colourful interchangeable backplates will be enough to guarantee that many purchases.