The forgotten phone: Samsung F330 from 2007

November 21, 2021 Luisa Rey

In this edition of ‘The forgotten phone’ we go to the year 2007. In that year the white, striking Samsung F330 appeared, with direct access to your music player. What else can be said about the Samsung F330?

Samsung F330

I instantly fell in love with the Samsung F330 when the device was released in 2007. A stark white device (or in black) and the striking slider design. Now it’s time to take a closer look at this phone, in our ‘The Forgotten Phone’ section, because was everything so rosy? The slider phone was aimed at the music lover. That also immediately revealed the design of this Samsung F330. When the phone was closed, you could immediately operate your music player with the keys below the screen. Below the control buttons was the button to directly start the music player. In addition to the keys, the telephone was equipped with touch keys, or touch-sensitive keys. This produced a negative point in many experiences; because these were not always pleasant to operate. In addition, a large group of users experienced issues with ghost calls and other ghost touches.

The Samsung F330 was equipped with a 2.1 inch TFT screen, a color screen with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. Samsung brought the device to the market with 24MB of memory, which fortunately could be expanded with a memory card. On the front, the F330 was equipped with a VGA 0.3 megapixel front camera. This could be used for video calling. On the back there was a 2 megapixel lens for taking pictures, and it could also be used for filming. Next to this camera was the well-known mirror, so you could see what you looked like for a selfie in 2007. The front camera could not be used for that. For the music lover, there wasn’t just the music player; an FM radio could also be found on the device. Samsung also gave the phone a battery capacity of 850 mAh.

Despite the beautiful appearance, the experiences of users with the Samsung F330 were often not positive. As mentioned, users experienced several issues with the touch keys. The F330 did get rid of key lock very quickly. When sending SMS, these keys were so sensitive that a message was often closed just like that, so that you had lost all your text. There were also a few things to criticize about the sliding mechanism of the device. So no clapper of a device.

Samsung released the F330 in the Netherlands for a price of between 250 and 300 euros.