Samsung Solid Immerse review

A tough, no nonsense candybar phone for clumsy people - but short on features

The definitive Samsung Solid Immerse review
The definitive Samsung Solid Immerse review

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Samsung Solid Immerse review: Internet

We've already grumbled a bit about the slow internet connectivity on the Samsung Solid Immerse, which is 3G but not HSDPA. That, along with the fact that there's no Wi-Fi, means you always have to wait around quite a lot when doing anything internet-related.

Samsung solid immerse

The 2-inch, 320 x 240 pixel screen also isn't up to displaying a whole lot of detail. Take a look at our own Home page, for example.

Samsung solid immerse

As it loads off the bat you barely see more than the headers. Scroll down and there's more visible, but you have to zoom to get to anything readable.

Samsung solid immerse

There is an option called 'broad view', though, which condenses things a little more and gives you a magnifier window so you can identify a part of a page to home in on. When you click the magnifier window to zoom in on a page you get a little more detail, and it's often enough to make a story readable – if you don't mind squinting.

Samsung solid immerse

There are three view options on a page – full screen, landscape and smart width. The latter does a good job of removing the need for horizontal scrolling, but text is really quite small.

When we tried to pop over to the BBC news website to see how well the Samsung Solid Immerse handled Flash from it, we got this response:

Samsung solid immerse

Other sites we tried didn't let us pay any embedded Flash videos. The mobile YouTube site did deliver video, but both it and the sound that went with it were too jerky to be of any worth at all.

We encountered a few 'page too large' errors while trying to browse, and when we were able to see pages the waiting time for them to load was often alarmingly long. Best advice? Don't expect to use this as an internet phone.