Verizon Wireless' update to the dual-hinge Alias packs a 'magical' e-ink keyboard and enhanced messaging. Check out our thoughts on this unique new phone in our Samsung Alias 2 review.
Review summary of the Samsung Alias 2:
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 A few improved apps and a magical keyboard are all it takes to make the Samsung Alias 2 a much more desirable phone than its predecessors, and one of the coolest consumer QWERTY phones around. That e-ink keyboard is very snazzy, and we hope the technology shows up on more phones, and more features on those phones, in the future. For now, while we're pleased with the addition of Microsoft Exchange e-mail, contacts and calendar support, we still think Samsung could have gone farther, especially with that adaptive keyboard. Call quality was very good, so folks who just want to make calls and send messages will be pleased with what they find in the Alias 2. But if you're looking for advanced features, like Web browsing, GPS navigation and multimedia playback, the Samsung Alias 2 can be something of a letdown. Still, none of that will matter when you pull it out of your pocket at parties and begin to wow the crowd with a bit of magic. Release: May 2009. Price: $70.
Pros: E-ink keyboard is as cool as they come. Corporate e-mail access is a nice addition. Very good call quality.
Cons: Keyboard could be put to use in more apps. Other than calling and messaging, features tended to be sub-par.
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Full Samsung Alias 2 Review:
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Design - Very Good
The Samsung Alias 2 looks almost exactly the same as the first Samsung Alias (and the Samsung SCH-U740), with one magical difference. While the first phones had keypads with letters and numbers printed perpendicular to each other, the Samsung Alias 2 uses e-ink technology to create an adaptable keyboard that displays different letters, numbers or symbols depending on how its being used. Without explaining e-ink in detail, it's a very cool idea, and it works nicely, especially on the dual-hinge Alias 2. Open the phone in portrait mode, and you get a numeric keypad, directional arrows and a host of shortcut keys, including a key for voice dialing, Bluetooth (power on or off), visual voice mail and more. Open the phone in landscape for messaging, and those numbers become a 4-row QWERTY keyboard, or a set of symbols keys, if you keep cycling through the options. The switch happens very quickly; just a brief black-out and then the keys reappear in their new configuration. Because e-ink is high contrast and works without power, the keys hold up nicely in bright light, and you can even read them with the battery removed.
It's a great trick, one that you'll want to show off to anyone who will pay attention. It's also useful, though the Samsung Alias 2 doesn't quite live up to its full potential. For one thing, the set of e-ink keyboard layouts is limited. There's no special layout for camera options, or gaming, which would have been a real coup. Also, sometimes keys would disappear on us just when we needed them, especially the all-important OK key. Sometimes it was there, other times we had to press the Enter key, and still other times that wouldn't work, and OK would appear in one of the soft keys up top.
Throughout the phone, we found some inconsistencies. In most apps, switching from portrait to landscape actually quit the app, which caused us to lose progress. In the Web browser, it seemed to be a matter of how quickly we could manage the switch. In switching orientation, the screen would redraw itself almost instantaneously, but we still had an unusual amount of errors during our test period. Apps often quit while opening, and Web pages and software would stop in the middle of a download, even while the phone reported a relatively strong network connection.
Regardless of those minor complaints, the Samsung Alias 2 is a likeable phone. The design is much cooler and more efficient than other unique messaging phones, like the LG enV2 or the LG Versa. The main menu has a clever design that looks like a college apartment, where the menu icons sit on shelves or hang on the wall. On the standby screen, birds occasionally fly by an open window. We wish this was more interactive. The stereo on the shelf could act as a music player interface, or that open window could show the real weather outside, but instead it just looks nice and friendly.
Calling - Very Good
Like its predecessor, the Samsung Alias 2 pleased us with its call quality. Calls made on Verizon Wireless' network in the greater Dallas metro area sounded very good. Voices were completely present and clean, not distant or distorted. We had little to no static from the phone on either end of a conversation. Battery life has been improved over the original phone. We got a little more than 5 hours of talk time out of the phone, which is just a bit more than Samsung promises. Even all our constant, fascinated switching of the e-ink keyboard didn't seem to drain the battery faster. Reception was average. The phone got about 2-3 bars of EV-DO service, though the simpler 1xRTT network reception was usually a bar ahead of EV-DO.
In the contact list, we see one of the more dramatic improvements on the Alias 2. The phone now ships with Remoba's Remosync app, which let us synchronize our Microsoft Exchange account with the phone. Unlike a similar work e-mail app on Sprint's One Touch phones, like the Samsung Rant, Remosync offers true integration with the Alias 2's contact list and calendar. We synchronized our account and all of our contacts showed up. The phone has a rather dumb search method. When you type a name, it jumps the list, but it doesn't gather names inclusively. So, if you type "lip," you'll jump to "Lipschitz, Adam," but you won't get "Philip."
Otherwise, the Samsung Alias 2 has a nice selection of calling features. Voice dialing is speaker independent and it gets its own dedicated button on the side of the phone, as well as a key on the e-ink keypad. It worked well in all our tests. The phone has a loud speakerphone, too, which also gets its own e-ink button. Bluetooth pairing went off without a hitch.
Messaging and Keyboard - Good
For messaging, the Samsung Alias 2 is certainly more capable than its predecessor in some very important ways, but it still isn't perfect. Text messaging worked fine, but we're big fans of threaded text messaging, which lets us see messages in a more conversational format. The Samsung Alias 2 has a basic form of threaded messaging, but it still didn't give us a bird's eye view of our conversation, so it wasn't much of an improvement over standard SMS. Instant messaging gets its own spot on the shelves of the main menu screen, but don't expect an updated IM app. It's still the same tired app with the same 3 services supported. If you use AOL, MSN or Yahoo, you're in luck, but we've become fans of Gtalk and Jabber, so we were left out.
For e-mail, there are a few options. Verizon Wireless' Mobile E-mail app supports a nice selection of clients, and if you don't see your favorite on the list, the app will try to download settings for you. This worked just fine for Gmail. As we mentioned earlier, the phone also comes with Remoba's Remosync app for Microsoft Exchange access. This worked just fine. It wasn't much to look at, in fact it was a downright unattractive app, and it lacked most of the advanced functions we'd expect from, say, a Windows Mobile smartphone, but for a basic messaging device, its nice to have a corporate option on board. Plus, the real coup here is contacts and calendar sync, which Remosync also supports.
Even with those options, we'd like to see more. It's time for these consumer messaging phones to start supporting the services consumers use most, especially the social networking apps like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. We'd like to see dedicated apps for each of these, with IM and e-mail access to our accounts. That would push the Samsung Alias 2 over the top for a consumer QWERTY device.
Besides the cool e-ink technology, the keys on the Samsung Alias 2's keyboard were quite comfortable for typing. Occasionally, it felt like the keyboard couldn't keep up with even our middling typing abilities. Letters would fail to appear, and we usually averaged 3-4 mistakes in a 160 character message because of this. We're not sure if the keys were too stiff and we weren't pressing hard enough or if there was a real hardware problem, but it was annoying, either way. The Samsung Alias 2 comes with T9 predictive typing software built in, but an autocorrect feature might have been more useful.
Multimedia - Good
For music and videos, the Samsung Alias 2 uses Verizon Wireless' familiar V Cast services. Unfortunately, multimedia seems to be something of an afterthought on the Alias 2. This phone could have been a multimedia powerhouse, especially with those nice, loud speakers on either side of the screen. To Samsung's credit, the Alias 2 does get external music controls so you can play tunes with the flip closed, but this blocks the speakers, and we found the external controls to lack sensitivity. We had to jab them hard to get them to register.
The phone had no trouble playing our music tracks off a 2GB microSD card, and it can also synchronize with a Rhapsody music library, if Rhapsody is your thing. Though Samsung claims the phone can handle cards up to 16GB, we tried an 8GB card in the Alias 2 and the phone wouldn't recognize it. Though Verizon Wireless brands the Alias 2 a "V Cast Music Phone" right on the box, the phone doesn't ship with any necessary accessories. No memory card, no USB cable for synchronizing tunes, and no headphones to fit the sub-standard 2.5mm headphone jack. There's not even a headphone adapter.
Web browsing - Mediocre
Perhaps the biggest disappointment on the Samsung Alias 2 is the lack of a real Web browsing app. The phone uses a simple Access Netfront WAP browser. It can load HTML pages in a zoomed-out, full page view, but when we zoomed in to read the contents of our own homepage, the layout lost its coherence and the page looked awful. Pages also loaded surprisingly slowly, considering the fast, 3G EV-DO network connection, and often pages would fail to load altogether. With its QWERTY keyboard and fast networking, the Alias 2 should be a much better phone for Web access. We'd like to see a more capable browser on this phone, like the Opera Mini browser, to make browsing a better experience.
Camera - Mediocre
The 2-megapixel camera on the Samsung Alias 2 was not bad, a definite improvement over its predecessor, but that still isn't saying much. Don't expect too much detail. Pictures were still a little grainy and fuzzy, especially at full crop. But from a slight distance, images were overall pleasant with accurate colors. We even liked the variety of photo options, including a panorama mode and some good camera controls over settings like White Balance and ISO. Check out our sample images below for the best pics we shot during out test period.
Cactus
Self Portrait
Ivy on the Mantel
Wildflowers
Panorama
GPS Navigation - Mediocre
Usually, we're fans of Verizon Wireless' VZ Navigator turn-by-turn navigation app, but on the Samsung Alias 2, the app really let us down. It seems to be the most recent version of the app, with speech recognition so you can simply speak addresses or search terms to start your trip. But once we hit the road, VZ Navigator on the Alias 2 had serious problems keeping up with us. It failed to follow us along our route, it didn't tell us about turns in time for us to make them, and it never corrected our route even when we had been off course for minutes. GPS performance seemed okay, since the phone found us quickly, but once we got moving, everything fell apart.
Price and availability
The Samsung Alias 2 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $70 with a contract agreement.
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