Beauty is in the eye of our Samsung Behold review, as we try out the most advanced touchscreen phone, with the new TouchWiz UI, now available on T-Mobile.
Review summary of the Samsung Behold:
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 The Samsung Behold reminds us quite a bit of the Samsung Instinct. It's not quite smart enough to be an iPhone clone, but it's still a good phone in its own right. In fact, in terms of call quality and calling features, it's a great phone. But Samsung still hasn't nailed the touchscreen interface. In some areas, like the QWERTY keyboard, they've done a great job, and it works well. In others, like the home page widgets and the problems we had with scrolling and moving through lists, the problems make using the phone a real chore. The phone has a very nice music player, but lacks a standard headphone jack, which seriously hobbles its potential. It uses fast networking on T-Mobile's new 3G network, but the Web browser lacks the deeper options needed to unleash its full potential. It's a flawed device, but not fatally flawed, and hopefully Samsung will work out most of these TouchWiz UI kinks as more of these phones come to market. Release: November 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Responsive screen. Great call quality and calling features. Fine music player.
Cons: Scrolling issues hurt using the interface. Widgets might not work at this size. Web browsing and video player both mediocre.
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Full Samsung Behold Review:
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Design - Good
The Samsung Behold is the first phone on the U.S. market to follow up on Samsung's promise for more TouchWiz phones. We saw a version of this UI on the Samsung Omnia that we previewed back in July, though that phone ran Windows Mobile, while this is a more of a standard multimedia not-as-smartphone. It's an all-touch phone, with only Send, End and Back buttons on the face. A lock button on the side locks the screen and keeps the phone from making calls in your pocket. We like the hardware lock button, it's a bit more convenient than a finger swipe (though not as chic).
The most important thing we ask for on an all-touch phone is a responsive interface, and for the most part the Samsung Behold delivers. We had some trouble with the way TouchWiz is designed, but no trouble with the screen registering our taps and swipes. We were also impressed by how quickly the phone responded to being tilted on its side. The orientation switch from portrait to landscape mode was very fast, even when the phone had to switch from a 12-key to a full-QWERTY onscreen keyboard.
Our problem is mostly with the widget-based home screen on the TouchWiz UI. There just isn't enough space on the 3.1-inch, 240 by 400 pixel screen for a useful collection of widgets. Maybe one or two, but the TouchWiz interface seems to assume you'll want a whole bunch. There is a collection of widgets in a drawer you can hide, but if you start to drag them out of the drawer and leave them lying around, they soon pile up. Literally, the widgets start to overlap and get stuck beneath the drawer. We had trouble opening and closing the widget drawer because the Samsung Behold isn't very good at dragging. You tap a tiny tab to close the drawer, and drag your finger up and down in the drawer to select widgets, then drag them out to expand them. Unfortunately, dragging present a problem in TouchWiz.
Actually, dragging and swiping are almost a deal-breaker on this phone. Often when we swiped out finger, whatever we happened upon last was clicked. We couldn't pick up our finger and drag again. This happened in the Widgets drawer on the home screen, in the File Viewer app, and pretty much anywhere there was a scrollable list. Occasionally we could scroll by dragging the scroll bar, but often the system didn't allow this, which seemed inconsistent. We also wish that scrolling actions on the phone would accelerate, or at least glide a bit. Unlike on most all-touch interface designs, flicking a list does not send it flying down the screen. On the Behold, even on long Web pages, you have to flick multiple times. And woe! unto you if you happen to pass upon a link or a list selection while you're flicking.
Still, the scrolling problems are not a deal-breaker on this phone, because the rest of the UI is very quick and responsive. This isn't the LG Dare, a phone that was unresponsive in almost every tap and gesture. Everything else on this phone, from the onscreen keyboards to the media player buttons, is nice and responsive. The phone also uses haptic feedback, so you'll get a vibration every time you tap. Well, almost every time, as the feedback didn't seem to work in the TeleNav navigation app.
Calling - Very good
Calls made on the Samsung Behold sounded very good. There was a slightly metallic quality to our voice on the caller's end of the line, but they got the short end of the stick because our side of the conversation sounded fine. We had some reception trouble. Our T-Mobile G1, on the same network, was getting 1-2 more bars of reception than this phone. For battery life, we managed a little more than 5.5 hours of calling time, which is actually pretty good for a large-screen phone on a 3G, HSDPA network.
The contact list was surprisingly robust and well-organized, with plenty of fields and a nice design, divided into tabs. We wish that T-Mobile and Samsung had included some synchronization software, but we were surprised to find the phone automatically updates with T-Mobile's own servers and your MyT-Mobile account every time we updated the contact list. It was actually a bit disruptive, as we couldn't go back into our address book until the update was complete, but better safe than sorry, we suppose.
The Samsung Behold boasts an abusively loud speakerphone, which is just how we like it. Voices sounded clear until we cranked it all the way up, at which point they still held together with a little distortion. The phone also has great call handling. It was very easy to swap and join two other calls for a 3-way conversation. The interface is very neat and clever. Finally, speaker-independent voice dialing from Nuance is built into the phone, and it even gets its own widget. As always, Nuance's software worked great in our tests.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung Behold didn't wow us with its messaging features, but it did have one of the better onscreen keyboards we've seen on a touchscreen phone. For messaging, the phone had standard SMS, as well as a few varieties of MMS messaging, including a picture message with audio that T-Mobile calls an audio postcard. We tried this option, but the picture it sent was ridiculously tiny. The Behold packs a 5-megapixel sensor, so why bother with these dinky little pics?
For Instant Messaging fans, the Samsung Behold features support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. The messaging client wasn't too advanced, but we found it to be a nice visual improvement over the standard carrier fare. On the Samsung Behold's large screen, the IM app had a polished, clean look, and worked well chatting, though there was a slight delay before our initial message went through.
The keyboard on the Samsung Behold doesn't look like anything special, but it managed to keep up with us as we pounded away in our e-mailing and messaging tests. It seemed very accurate and responsive, and definitely designed for 2-handed typing. The letters pop out from under your finger toward the middle, so 1-handed use blocks this effect on the far side of the phone. As we said earlier, the Behold is very quick about switching to the QWERTY keyboard when you tilt the phone, and we found only a few scant text fields on the device where we couldn't switch to the wider keyboard. In portrait mode, the phone uses predictive input and a 12-key numeric layout.
Multimedia - Good
The media player on the Samsung Behold is solid, with a nice interface and a brief, though effective range of features. It was easy to control playback with our fingers, and the phone synchronized with our Windows Media Player library with no trouble, even importing our album artwork into tiny thumbnails. There are no dedicated hardware controls for music, but the music player gets its own widget, so you can see the title of your tunes and control the music from the home screen. In Mass Storage mode we also found the music transfer (and any USB data transfer) to be blazingly fast, clearly taking full advantage of a USB 2.0 connection.
The phone comes with a 1GB microSD card, and the slot can handle up to 8GB, which is nice, considering the good music player and the 5-megapixel camera. But if we're going to play music on this phone, we wish Samsung had included a 3.5mm headphone jack, or even an adapter. There is a set of stereo headphones in the box that will work with Samsung's outdated proprietary adapter, but we would always rather use our own cans. The phone also works with stereo Bluetooth, though, and worked fine with our wireless Bluetooth speakers.
For video playback, the Samsung Behold is held back by a stodgy player and a strange screen resolution. While the Apple iPhones and the T-Mobile G1 have used a 360 by 480 pixel resolution, the Samsung Behold uses a screen that packs 240 by 400 pixels. The video player won't play videos that are too large for either of these dimensions, so we had to down-convert our MP4 videos to QVGA, at 320 by 240 pixels. Even then, videos looked blocky and pixilated, and the videos never quite filled the screen properly. Since T-Mobile has no streaming video service, the video player is kind of a wash on this phone.
Web browsing - Mediocre
We've seen a lot of claims about a full-html browser on this phone, but in practice it hardly matters if the browser can render full pages because most of our favorite sites would only recognize this phone as a mobile Web device. Then, the phone would render most pages in a single-column view. The worst part is that there were no settings for the Web browser for these issues. You can't change how the browser identifies itself, so CNN and the NYTimes homepage, not to mention Google's Reader and Facebook, all deliver their sub-par mobile content. This is too bad, and a waste of a so-called full-HTML browser.
Because of our problems scrolling on this phone, navigation was also an issue, though more an annoyance than a serious problem. Navigating through one of the long Web-page columns took a lot of flicking. There is a good menu system for the Web browser, but it just isn't very capable, so the good menus don't help much. We wish there was a mini-map or some other fast navigation tool on board.
Camera - Good
On paper, the camera looks like an impressive feature for the Samsung Behold. In practice, however, we were quite disappointed with the results we got. It is a 5-megapixel, auto focus lens, and under the best lighting conditions we got some nice detail thanks to the large image size, but even these best-case images failed to truly impress us, and some of the lower-quality shots were truly disappointing. Details were completely gone from the wealth of foliage shots we've been taking. The colors were present and richly saturated, at times even bleeding into the more drab spots. But try distinguishing even a single leaf from its tree, and you'll run into problems.
Frosted leaves, up close
This is our favorite shot with the Samsung Behold, certainly worthy of becoming a desktop wallpaper. Details here are actually pretty good, though we wish the camera could have gotten closer, into macro range. This was a few inches from the pile.
Sunrise through leaves
Not sure where the camera was focused, because all the leaves in this shot were blurry. We'll say the sun was in our eyes for this one. Still, the camera did a nice job with the sunrise hues.
Berry bush
The bush here is a mess. The individual branches all seem to run into each other without distinction, and the red berries left behind after the leaves fell off are just tiny dots of bright color. Plus, check out the glow and fringing around the bright white fence post in the lower right.
Backlit trees
We swear the lens was clean for this one, even though the camera couldn't handle the sunrise backlighting at all. Where they still come through, the colors look bright and fresh, and detail is the least of our trouble here.
Foliage and landscape
Row of trees
Dwarf pine
Here we've engaged the camera's WDR mode, which is supposed to help with backlighting issues. In this shot, it seems to have done the trick. The sky doesn't dominate in the slightest, and the reds looks rich and vibrant. Maybe too rich, but it's a pleasant effect. No detail at full zoom, however, as the trees start to look oily and blotchy.
E-bay shot
Blame our lighting for the harshness at Snake Eyes' feet, because this photo was actually pretty good. The fine details on the card are revealed for wary buyers, and every tiny number and letter is perfectly legible.
Self-portrait outdoors
Self-portrait using the LED
We were happy with the outdoor shot. It was a little fuzzy at full zoom, but had nice color and detail in any case. Also, we like the depth of field provided by the camera's focal point. Indoors, with the camera's LED flash, the picture is predictably cool and blue, but unpredictably fuzzy and blurred.
34th Street
The red lights are clearly bleeding into their surroundings in this shot, in which we also engaged the WDR mode to ensure the backlight wouldn't underexpose the buildings and people in the foreground. It isn't a crystal clear shot, but the camera's lighting tricks seemed to have worked here, again.
Living room panorama
Considering the Samsung behold takes a long, 6-shot panorama, we were very disappointed by how small the image actually was. However, like the Motorola Zine ZN5 we just reviewed, the Samsung Behold has an automated panorama mode, where you hold the camera and sweep your hand while it takes the pictures in succession. It doesn't work perfectly every time, but when it does the stitching is usually pretty good. Still, we wish the final pics were much, much larger.
GPS navigation - Mediocre
The Samsung Behold comes with TeleNav for turn-by-turn GPS navigation. GPS is still something of a novelty to Samsung devices, and we had serious trouble getting the phone to find us in New York City. We tried navigating under the wide-open sky of the East Village as well as in the concrete jungles of midtown, but had no luck getting a satellite signal until we were out of New York and in New Jersey. In the suburbs, the phone had no trouble finding us, but it did have a hard time following us closely. Often, it seemed like the phone was ahead or behind us, and when we stopped at a stop sign, we noticed the navigation software kept going. It always came back to our actual location, but this did hurt us on a couple of confusing 5-way intersections.
Price and availability
The Samsung Behold is now available for $200 from T-Mobile with a two-year contract. A $50 mail-in rebate is available when you sign up for a qualifying plan.
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