Design-wise, the U900 falls into the fashion phone category, with a sleek profile, classy brushed metal veneer and black trim along the edges. The spring-loaded slider is smooth and well-constructed, revealing a laser-etched keypad similar to the ones found on Motorola’s RAZR line of phones. It’s not as comfortable though – as the keypad area is shorter and narrower, there isn’t as much room to move between each key.

Sitting between the soft keys and call buttons on the front is what Samsung refers to as a ‘smart adaptive touch window’, an innovation that won the company an IF Design Award in 2007. This essentially replaces the traditional five-way navigation button that most phones use with virtual buttons that change depending on the screen you’re on. Most of the time, it presents the standard arrow keys, but within specialised applications like the music player, it shows buttons specific to the program (in this case playback controls). Samsung has also incorporated haptic feedback so you feel a slight buzz when pressing the virtual buttons.
 
The adaptive touch window is a cool feature that works well for the most part, but it’s still inferior to a mechanical navigation pad – especially when you’re scrolling through a list of items quickly, as it’s marginally slower than tactile arrow keys.

As far as features go, the U900 is a mixed bag of entry-level and high-end. Bundled applications are the standard fare of PIM, multimedia, games and web, but it’s also one of the few mobiles to support 7.2Mbps HSDPA – a feature that’s wasted on the U900’s simple WAP browser. The faster Internet access is ideal for streaming video from Foxtel Mobile and BigPond TV on the Telstra-branded U900, but given the video feed is optimised for slower 3G speeds, we didn’t notice any difference in quality.