Samsung Behold (T-Mobile)

Calls and speakerphone: For the most part, we found calls loud and clear on the Samsung Behold. However, we did notice that positioning your finger over the general camera lens area on the back of the phone during a call results in bits of static during a call. We rarely used the side volume keys to adjust the sound up or down. Callers said we came through loud and clear. Using the speakerphone didn’t seem to degrade call quality on our end and we appreciate how easy it is to activate the speakerphone. Additionally, you don’t have to be too close to the cell phone when using the speakerphone to be heard by callers – a definite plus.

Audio quality: Playback of songs is acceptable through the cell phone’s speakers, and songs didn’t sound terribly tinny. Since the speaker is on the front of the Samsung cell phone (essentially in the same spot as the ear piece) turning it face down during music playback greatly muffles the sound. The Samsung Behold has a proprietary headset jack. The cell phone’s charger and the headset jack share the same proprietary port. So you’ll need to get an optional Samsung proprietary cell phone stereo headphones. Another option is to get a stereo Bluetooth headset since the Samsung Behold supports stereo Bluetooth.

Menu/phone book: The Samsung Behold has a menu interface that’s designed to make using the touch screen fun and to provide a deeper level of personalization – more than just cosmetic changes. In a straight line going down the edge of the left hand side of the screen are a series of icons. You can, of course, swipe your finger up and down the line to scroll through the icons. The icons correspond to an application on the Samsung cell phone and tapping on one of the icons will launch that application. If you hold and drag that icon onto the remaining screen area you’ll get a mini version of the app on the screen, which you can then position anywhere on the screen. For example, if you select music, a mini-player will appear on the screen that you can use to play, stop/pause, and skip to other songs. Additionally, stationed at the bottom of the screen are one touch access to the Phone, Phone Book, Web, and Menu. We particularly like the button that sits between the talk and end buttons: It’s a back button. Whenever you are somewhere in an application where you don’t want to be, simply press the back button and it will either back you out one screen at a time or ask if you’d like to Exit an Application. We found it a helpful tool for navigating through the phone’s menus. Another fun feature on this cell phone is the jot application, where you can essentially use your finger to draw letters and symbols instead of inputting them on the screen via the numeric keypad or the virtual keyboard. While the application is fun to use, it’s hardly intuitive. That said, we particularly like how easy it is to use the phone book, which can store 2,000 contacts, each with four phone numbers, web site, 4 IM handles, a street address, and a picture.

Camera/video: The Samsung Behold sports a 5-megapixel camera that can take photos and record short videos. It has a flash and a tiny mirror near the lens for snapping self portraits. You can snap a picture by pressing the dedicated camera button, however, you do need to hold it down until the picture is captured or you might miss your shot. Since the Samsung Behold does come with a 5-megapixel digital camera it does have its fair share of more advance features, such as white balance, auto focus and face detection, ISO settings, exposure meter (spot, matrix, and center-weighted), effects (normal, negative, water color, black and white, and sepia), and even anti-shake. If you don’t know what any of those terms mean, no worries; once you select one a definition of what that feature does scrolls across the bottom of the screen.

About taking pictures, the shutter is acceptable once you figure out how to actually capture a picture. That said, it’s not the fastest shutter we’ve seen on a camera phone – nor is it the slowest. As expected, the entire screen turns into a viewfinder (similar to digital cameras), so it seems like you have more room to frame your photo. Additionally, once you take a picture there are a few things you can do with it such as sharing it, uploading it to an online album, and our favorite: adding a voice recording and sending it as a digital postcard. As for image quality, we were impressed with the quality both on screen and downloaded to a computer. We found colors to be vivid and the images clear and sharp. You can also take videos with this cell phone, too. Video quality is pretty good and images really only blur when you shake the camera. We should note that it’s easy to accidentally cover the lens with your finger when you’re shooting videos.

Music: The Samsung Behold sports an MP3 player and comes with 180MB of internal memory, so you can store quite a few songs (at least a few albums' worth of tunes) and pictures on the cell phone. If you want more storage, we recommend buying an optional MicroSD media card, as this cell phone will support up to a 16GB MicroSD card. You can play MP3s and Apple’s AACs audio files (sorry, no support for Microsoft’s WMA audio files) on the MP3 player. As noted, the audio quality is pretty good through the cell phone speaker.

Before we get into too many music details, we’re happy to report that you can set any song as a ringtone either for all incoming calls or just an individual contact. The Samsung Behold doesn’t have many audio-centric controls such as the ability to manually adjust bass and treble, there is a Sound Effects menu where you can choose the genre of music of songs such as Rock or Jazz to optimize playback in that manner. It really doesn’t make a big difference either way. There’s also the ability to Shuffle, Repeat All or just one song, and Skip songs. You can even create playlists on-the-fly. Another nice feature is that music will still play in the background while you’re using other features. When necessary the application will pause the music (for example, when a call comes in or you’re taking a picture), but then it will resume where it left off once you are finished using that application.

Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to pair the Samsung cell phone with a Plantronics 925 Bluetooth headset. We found call quality to be acceptable with the headset. And callers had no idea we were using a headset let alone a cell phone.

Look and feel: If you see the back of the Behold before you see the front, you might not think this Samsung is a cell phone at all. You might just think it’s a digital camera because from the back, it looks like a pocketable digital camera. Turn it over and you see that it’s actually a touch screen cell phone. This Samsung cell phone is more on the minimalistic side – read: it’s not littered with too many buttons. In fact, the front of the cell phone only has three keys: Talk, Back, and End/Power. On the Behold’s side spines you’ll find volume keys, dedicated camera key, and a lock key. About that Lock Key, this replaces the lock function found on the display of most touch screen cell phones. When you want to use the cell phone, you’ll be prompted to unlock it by touching this key. While we appreciate how secure this makes the cell phone, we did find that we needed to extend the time before the phone automatically locked as a result of no use.

The Samsung Behold cell phone comes in two colors: Rose and Espresso. The cell phone feels comfortable in the hand, fitting just right so that you can still easily maneuver through the cell phone’s features one handed if you so desire. It also isn’t too uncomfortable when you hold it up to your ear or cradle it between ear and shoulder for longer calls. However, since the screen comes so close to your face, it can attract a lot of face grease. About that screen, it’s pretty bright. We are also happy to report that we found the screen easy to view in direct sunlight when looking directly at it.

Keypad: Like many cell phones today the Samsung Behold has a touch screen and as such offers two types of keypads: numeric and QWERTY. As far as touch screens go the one found on the Behold was pretty responsive and even better once we calibrated the screen. . We like the numeric keypad that appears when you press the phone icon at the base of the main screen and the QWERTY keypad that appears on a reoriented horizontal display when you turn the cell phone in a message screen. There are also little touches that we appreciated as well, such as the .com key that appears as part of the QWERTY keypad and the ability to jot freehand or just draw a picture. The nice thing about the keyboard is that the keys are spaced fairly well apart – so mistypes are at a minimum.

In the battery life department, the Samsung Behold is acceptable, but not stellar. But before we get into that, let’s talk about the charger. We found that the cell phone could last about three days before recharging when using the Samsung Behold regularly to make calls, occasionally surf the wireless Web, listen to music, and send/receive text messages. Users who barely use the cell phone to make/receive calls and send/receive messages can probably last closer to about four days before needing to recharge, while heavier cell phone users will likely need to charge the Behold nightly just to be on the safe side. We should note that the Samsung cell phone uses a proprietary charger instead of one of the USB varieties, like many other cell phones currently available.