Samsung Steel, made for Vodafone, is evidently based on U900 Soul. The bit square-like design and the steel case are signs of this, while the original phone's specifications have been changed here and there. The first, and most obvious difference is the lack of the touch panel, that has been present on Soul, and it also performed very well during the test.

Instead of this there is a conventional navigation ring on Steel. Another difference is that instead of the 5 megapixel camera there is only a 3 MP one, while HSDPA support is decreased from 7.2 megabits to 3.6 megabits. Samsung Steel is a sliderphone with a polished metallic finish, similar to the Samsung Soul, and is designed with a minimalst front panel featuring a large 2.2-inch 262K-colour display.

In addition to high-speed browsing, downloading and surfing using HSDPA, the Samsung Steel is equipped with a 3-megapixel camera with an autofocus system. A secondary video call camera is on the front panel. Multimedia player functionality is built in, and there's 30MB of internal storage boosted by MicroSD card expansion, with cards of up to 8GB capacity supported. The Steel can handle emails with a document viewer to view attachments, and a full web browser is built in.

The phone also has a DAB receiver inside, allowing users to tune into high quality digital radio stations - a feature previously only seen before on Virgin Mobile's Lobster 700TV digital TV smartphone.