Review: Samsung Lily mobile phone

As the mobile phone has evolved and landed in the hands of young girls and boys across the world, demand has increased for phones bearing fashion features.

The Samsung Lily, a clamshell phone, has been co-developed by fashion designer Miss Sixty and is aimed at fashion-conscious girls, coming with a free bottle of perfume. It is available on Orange pay-as-you-go.

At first glance the phone appears to fit the bill: it’s small and skinny enough to fit into the smallest handbag or jeans pocket and has a nice analogue clock design that pops up on the screen at the front of the phone. However, this is where the pleasing aesthetics end.

The shiny white casing and the purple metallic that surrounds the keypad make the phone look cheaper than designer quality. This could be forgiven if the phone’s features were a little better, but they’re not. The menu interface is graphically simple and is also predominately black, making navigation extremely hard. It is also rather clunky and slow.

Typing out a text message is a hassle ­ the keypad is stiff and the predictive text slow. But access to the web is much better. This is probably the only phone where dialling a number isn’t a pleasant experience: the numbers come out in rainbow colours making it hard to read.

The camera, equipped with a double zoom feature, also takes clear pictures that can be stored on the phone’s 2MB internal memory.

In its defence, there is a nice flower motif on the front of the phone that lights up when the phone rings, although that's just as well, as the ringtones that come with the Samsung Lily are so bad that most users will probably want to keep it on silent anyway.