Why was the Samsung SGH E250 so popular? Can we expect something similar in the present day?
The Samsung SGH E250 was a legendary slider phone that rocked back in the early 2000s. Samsung, a company that was known to be one of the dominators before Android came in producing a lot of striking performer phones. The Samsung E250 was one of them. In an era, where every Samsung model was lacking something or the other, be it FM radio or memory card slot, the E250 was the attempt to present all-in-one features.
The hot and stylish E250 was available for an amount of Rs 7000.
Let’s look at the features that made it so popular and preferable back in the days.
The E250 was introduced back in 2006 as a cheap and entry-level version of the popular Samsung D900.
The E250 came in with a large, 2-inch display size on a 65k TFT screen. The phone had a very sleek and fast-paced user interface making it very convenient to use. The speed performance of this phone was pleasurable beyond expectations. The phone could use the whole screen for a native resolution wallpaper. It came in with a resolution of 128 x 160.
The E250 did perfect work when it came to its key layering. Every key was placed right in the right amount of size and gave the most comfortable click experience. The navigation buttons operated all the directional buttons perfectly too.
When it came to the technical features, the E250 made sure it didn’t lack anything necessary. The E250 was a tri-band GSM along with GPRS and EDGE. GPRS and EDGE weren’t that common in that price range back then. The phone also featured a WAP 2.0/XHTML browser. It had a USB 1.1 connectivity option. It also featured Bluetooth 2.0 along with A2DP stereo support. Because of this, one could use cordless headsets to listen to music.
It had a micro SD card slot that could take up to 1 GB of SD cards. It had 10MB of internal memory capacity. The phone had the capacity to store up to 1000 entries in the phone itself. It also supported picture caller IDs for contacts.
This phone was well ingrained when it came to security features. The most popular feature of all was the Mobile Tracker. It could automatically send an alert SMS whenever the SIM card was replaced. A buyer was supposed to activate the Mobile Tracker while buying the phone. They had the option to enter two numbers to whom the alert messages would be sent too. If this phone was stolen, the moment the thief would put in a new SIM card, the designated numbers would receive the alert message. The default alert message was “Please save this message” and couldn’t be changed. The designated owner of the numbers was meant to be informed about this so that they would understand when they receive the alert message. Along with the alert message it also sent the IMEI number of the thief’s number.
Along with this, the E250 came up with an Emergency SOS alert. In an emergency situation like the occurrence of a kidnap attempt, the owner had the option to press the Volume key four times and the emergency message would be sent to 10 people from the owner’s phone. These numbers were supposed to be assigned beforehand.
Lastly, it featured a Privacy Lock option which lets the user assign a passcode to view/access anything on the phone.
It came in with a standard MP3/AAC player, 3GP/MP4 video player, and FM Radio Tuner. It came in with a maximum camera resolution of 640 x 480 with a 1 MP VGA CMOS camera.
It is unpredictable whether Samsung would come up with such a phone again. In an era when Android has taken over and low-end phone users are comparatively growing less, it’s unsure how much of an experiment Samsung might carry out in producing such a phone again. However, technology is always transforming and one can never be sure what the tech geeks might come up with any day.
