The iPhone may not have sold as many units as Steve Jobs had hoped, but it certainly made the more traditional mobile phone manufacturers sit up and take notice.

And in a Korean lab, Samsung’s engineers came up with the F490 – it’s got a really big touch screen like an iPhone, it’s quite slim like an iPhone, but oh dear, it’s just so far away from actually being an iPhone.

Slim and solid phone

First, the good stuff. It’s a great-looking slab of minimalist cool.

Its flush fascia promises much with its huge 72x40mm touch screen atop a trio of discreet buttons (call start, end and menu) and the smooth back is broken only by the 5 megapixel camera lens with flash and self-portrait mirror. It’s big, but because it’s relatively slim at 12mm it doesn’t really feel it, and sits comfortably in the hand.

But flip the slider button on the side to awaken the 262,000-colour touch screen and the problems begin.

Frustrating controls

It’s the latest Samsung phone to use the ‘Croix’ interface, so-called because you can drag the centre point of a cross around the screen with your thumb to the various menu icons. Scrolling through the menus you can do the stroking thing, where you rub your thumb across the screen either up or down to get around and access different menus.

This bit actually isn’t bad, but as soon as you need to do anything that requires precision pointing, like clicking on internet hot links or using the onscreen keyboard, the touch screen simply isn’t up to the job. It’s not very sensitive and requires quite a bit of pressure, not altogether intuitively.

The screen also locks up very quickly (maximum 15 seconds), requiring you to flick the slider again or press the camera shutter button to activate it again if you need it, say, in the middle of a phone call. And to finish a call you’ll need two button presses, once to wake the screen and another to finish the call. This gets really irritating very quickly.

The lack of sensitivity meant that we found ourselves making a lot of mis-keys, and having to do a lot of double and triple presses too. The ‘VibeTonez’ haptic feedback supposedly helps guide your thumb to the right button but the lack of accuracy meant that this just got irritating after a while and we switched it off.

Glossy screen

The screen has a nifty scrolling innovation in that if you brush your thumb down the left side it scrolls faster than if you brush the right side.

That’s if you can get it to work without accidentally activating the menu functions while you’re doing it – something we found to be well nigh impossible.

You can use the volume buttons on the side for scrolling, which helps but a better touch interface would certainly be a lot more fun. Also, the F490 is an extremely glossy brick, and even with the brightness turned up full the screen is very difficult to see in direct sunlight.

Another missed opportunity is the time and date on the home screen – you can click on each to view, but not edit. If you want to put a date in the diary or change the time, you’ll need to go through the standard menu route.