(Prudent Press Agency)---Just when touchscreens, QWERTY sliders and Android phones are making inroads into the mainstream mobile phone markets across various demographics, mobile phone makers are not about to give up on the traditional and the conventional candybars and slider handsets that have defined the mobile phone landscape for nearly a generation. They still comprise the bulk of affordable full feature phones to a vast portion of the market wanting high value phones.

Korean mobile phone leader Samsung has just announced a near revival of their slim candybar and slider handsets with the new Shark range of handsets.

One of them, the new Samsung S5550 Shark 2 brings a three-way marriage of affordability, elegant simplicity and full-featured functionality on a budget slider that pitches to a social networking crowd wanting a phone as a primary communications medium, not a movie player or a GPS SatNav gadget.

Getting the Social Graces

As a social networking phone, you get a highly intuitive and flexible non-smartphone user interface that allows instant access to SNS like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo right from the homescreen. Its also comes with a communities software that enable quick updates and uploading to your favorite photo and video sharing sites like Picasa, Photobucket, Flickr and YouTube.

Unfortunately as a budget phone, it has no WiFi that can get you social networking activities in hotspots. There’s also no GPS which is often harnessed for some social networking functions.

Standard Features

Except for the S3550 Shark3, all the Shark phones are 3G phones. In addition the Shark 2 has HSDPA at 3.6 Mbps data connectivity on its dual band UMTS radio for the high speed downloading and social networking activities. It is also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. There’s Bluetooth 2.1 and USB 2.0 for wireless and wired data synching, respectively.

There’s the usual multimedia players that supports all the popular media file formats and comes with Samsung’s proprietary DNSe 2.0 sound enhancement processing software for stereo widening and surround effects. You also get stereo FM with broadcast recording. Internal memory is a mere 110 MB but you get microSD expandability for up to 8 GB according to the spec sheet but we wouldn’t be surprised if you can use 16 GB microSD cards as well.

Unique features

Its 2.2 inch QVGA screen with 256k colors may look ordinary but it uses AMOLED display technology which, because of no LCD backlighting, consumes less power. Talk about power consumption, its 960 mAh battery gives you one of the longest talk times among handsets, 11 hours and 26 hours on standby.

Samsung made sure its slider phone is a cut above its own sliders in the past. It’s 102 x 49 x 15mm body is a well-crafted blend of plastic, metal and Kevlar that gives it a lightweight 99g which , together with an ergonomically textured design at the back, gives its an excellent feel in your hands.

Bringing a modest Samsung S5550 Shark2 above the pack is its 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, face/smile detection, image stabilization and QVGA video recording at a smooth 30fps – something you’d be lucky to find in entry level handsets anywhere.